We live fully immersed institutional lives, enabled and constrained by powerful social forces that structure our every decision. Institutions amplify or compound the good we can do for one another. Just think about what churches, schools, libraries, YMCAs, unions, rotary clubs, or chambers of commerce can do for us at their best. We organize and specialize to make more efficient use of limited resources or to amplify our smaller individual powers to greater common effect. 

Yet institutions are not an unmitigated good. An insurance company, for example, may have started in order to help farmers weather the uncertainties of flooding, hail, or drought. But decades later a host of priority and policy changes result in an institution driven by maximizing premiums, creating a labyrinth of exclusions, and minimizing insurance payouts. The care for actual farmers becomes a vague memory. When institutions succumb to various pathologies, they make our life difficult, exposing us to hazards that are quite different from the usual risks of disease or accidents or other maladies. 

We may think this kind of analysis represents mastery of our collective expressions and how they may go wrong. But I am not convinced. Somewhere between scholarly analysis of organizations and the populist rejection of institutions there is a growing need for much more robust conversations about the institutional pathologies we live with and experience directly. We need practical insights that help all of us discern and navigate the institutional dynamics that affect us every day—often making our lives better but sometimes making them much worse. 

That we can go wrong together has a long tradition in Christian social thought. The Old Testament prophets often levelled accusations at religious leaders who had adopted patterns of rule that gave the appearance of devotion but were devoid of justice or mercy. In the New Testament, Jesus assigned culpability to Pharisees and teachers of the law, key members of the Jewish religious institutions in the first century. Christ himself chastised them for the boundaries, barriers, and obstacles they had instituted and that made it much more difficult than necessary to pursue a God-honouring life. 

In People of the Lie, psychologist M. Scott Peck argued decades ago that collective human action is capable of a particularly evil character because institutions can eclipse individual moral responsibility. When all of us are responsible, none of us are. We inhabit a host of collective structures that can encode and amplify vice as well as virtue. Concrete understanding of institutional pathologies, then, can be a guardrail preventing us from veering into vague or abstract reflections. 

It isn’t necessary to know the evolutionary history or anatomical details of an agitated mother grizzly bear—a dangerous beast if ever there was one—to grasp she is dangerous and should be avoided. What we need are strategies that will help us see more clearly the dangerous beasts of our institutional lives and discern wisely in the moment. The following list of six dangerous institutional pathologies, therefore, is not intended to be comprehensive or exhaustive, but I hope it will be catalytic in helping institutions and those who inhabit them to diagnose, to triage, and maybe even to remedy the ways in which they have implicitly or explicitly undermined the common good.

Six Dangerous Institutional Beasts (and Where to Find Them)

With a built-in fishing pole protruding from its forehead, the anglerfish attracts friends from far and wide. But beware appearances: behind the friendship lie fangs.

The gap between an institution’s stated mission and its actual effect represents a particularly vexing and primary shortcoming. It would be difficult to find an organization that does not espouse a direct good in summarizing itself or why it exists. In fact, I cannot recall ever reading a mission, purpose, or vision statement in which an organization publicly affirmed that it would do the opposite of what it said it would do. Yet we can easily find many instances of a glaring gap between actual behaviours and mission-statement aspirations.

Stating this gap risks becoming an institutional Captain Obvious. We need to get well beyond that. “Iatrogenic,” a medical term about a cure that causes a disease, is now used by social scientists to describe institutions that deliver outcomes exactly opposite of their stated purpose. Health-care systems that cause sickness and death, educational institutions that impair learning, or political systems that reduce the voices of citizens are obvious examples of this pathologically organized hypocrisy.

The gap between aspirations and outputs is inherent, but it becomes pathological when senior leadership—boards, CEOs, presidents, executive directors—lacks the courage or conviction to directly address it. Often, the more noble the mission of the organization—curing cancer, ending world hunger, stopping global warming—the more latitude it gives itself to compromise the means to achieve its noble end. In such disordered organizations, power or financial reward is often extracted from lower levels of the staff or customer base for the personal benefit of a very few. This behaviour is enshrined as a value because it looks like growth. The mission could be noble, reinforced in branding and communications, while the actual function accrues value upward at the expense of donors, customers, or staff.

As Joel Bakan argues in The Corporation, for-profit organizations have a special penchant toward this pathology because of their profit-seeking justification. As long as profit is being generated and missteps—legal or otherwise—don’t threaten the organization, success is assigned, and work that might even undermine the stated mission continues. The social contract that commercial enterprises depend on is scarcely noted until the extraction becomes so extreme it cannot be ignored. A paradox emerges: those in leadership roles readily accept the rewards that are funnelled upward, but they reject the same upward concentration when it comes time to accept responsibility for wrongdoing.

The Anglerfish: Questions for Discernment

1. How great is the salary differential between the top and the bottom of the organization? The wider the gap, the greater the potential for pathological behaviour.
2. How well does the corporate narrative found in formal statements (mission, vision, purpose, etc.) or issued in public communications match what is said in the lunchroom or in the bar after work? A poor match reflects a high degree of group pathology.
3. How welcome are counterpoint comments or ideas in senior leadership circles? Does the achievement of mission take priority over control or ego building?

All fear this “blood-sucking” beast of the deep sea, but the vampire squid’s highly evolved specializations make it a sad loner always ready to lash out.

We value institutions because they specialize and focus resources in ways that are beneficial. An auto-parts manufacturing plant, for instance, can efficiently deliver the necessary parts on time because it gives all its attention to that function. A surgeon can perform a technical set of procedures because she has specialized in developing the skills needed to do precisely that. We all depend on such institutional specialization every day with or without thinking about it. 

However, this kind of focus can produce a certain myopia about the context around which and within which those specializations are carried out. Institutional specialization at its pathological worst severs its acts from human ethical responsibility. My responsibility as a local bank manager may be to meet in person with people interested in getting a loan, but the structure of the process is likely such that I will have little or no discretion about the decision to approve the loan. Even if the woman sitting in front of me has a valid and critical need, I’ll dutifully enter the data, and when she is rejected, I will just be doing my job. Those above my pay grade have even less concern for her. 

There is a duty to recognize the ways in which this fragmentation produces the reactive, immature response of passing the moral buck while troubling or terrible things keep happening. Peck argues that this risk can be offset but not easily: “The plain fact of the matter is that any group will remain inevitably potentially conscienceless and evil until such time as each and every individual holds himself or herself directly responsible for the behavior of the whole group—the organism—of which he or she is a part.” 

What we are responsible for and how we act on that responsibility can, of course, be deeply undermined by ignorance, unquestioned attitudes, misinformation, disinformation, or propaganda. As this distortion is embedded in the structures of institutions, individual conscience and moral responsibility can be reduced to the circle of our duties or jobs. If we want to keep our job or get that promotion, we will simply keep to our knitting and reduce our moral compass to survival and self-preservation. Under these conditions it is much easier to stay quiet and follow the given script. Specialization makes these kinds of group dynamics easier to propagate and can foster them because anything outside our circle is simply someone else’s job and we should stay out of it. 

A simple test is to act or speak in a way that is counter to the prevailing organizational practice or outside the scope of our given work. The reaction is a signal. In the My Lai massacre, mentioned by Peck, several hundred villagers were killed by American troops in Vietnam. Speaking out would have made one a stool pigeon, Peck notes, and stool pigeons die. One helicopter pilot did radio to headquarters to express his concern but was told to attend to his duties, so he dropped the matter. In other words, fly the helicopter as you’ve been trained to do and don’t concern yourself with the unfolding massacre. 

Institutional evil is at its most insidious when individuals feel no remorse or guilt, knowing that nothing wrong has happened within the small flashlight circle of their duties. It may be that while a CEO would never steal your lunch during the workday, he would have no problem making a decision that ends your career, reduces your pension, uses legal means to capture ideas that sever the tie to the originator, or in other ways deprives you or leaves you destitute. The processes may even be tedious and mundane. Hannah Arendt calls this the banality of evil. 

The Vampire Squid: Questions for Discernment 

1. Is it possible to question practices outside the immediate scope of your work? Are your concerns taken seriously?
2. Have you ever encountered procedures or requirements that didn’t seem right to you but that were official and therefore assumed to be acceptable? 
3. How much responsibility would you feel if the institution you are part of were identified as a perpetrator of something culpable?

The Ouroboros’s worst enemy is itself. For obvious reasons. 

Institutions, once established, will reflexively act to preserve themselves. One of Clay Christensen’s significant contributions in The Innovator’s Dilemma is to observe how subtle structural dynamics ensure not only that innovation is weeded out by institutional process but also that institutions and established organizations are, in all cases, incapable of innovation. 

Institutional networks, processes, policies, and practices requiring regulatory bodies can all produce a “social momentum” that perpetuates the organization and insulates it from unwanted disruptions or abuses. But those same social ballasts will be the bulwarks against reform when harm is being done. Because these structures are often agnostic to the stated purpose of the organization, it doesn’t matter how noble the organizational objectives are. The dynamics remain. A hypothetical company could call itself Innovation Central, but the application of benign human-resource processes, slow and standardized approvals, detailed time-use expectations, or related performance policies ensures that anything innovative is systematically eliminated without anyone ever making an anti-innovation decision. 

When populist movements succeed and take power, they must quickly adopt or develop their own institutional responses to meet the demands of public leadership. Over time, the grassroots leaders become heads of departments, organizations, and institutions. The trajectory of these institutions creates social momentum that resists change (both good and bad) through muting or eliminating innovation. When the institution contributes positively to the common good, that robustness and resilience of purpose is the very advantage we seek in developing these persistent social structures. Yet we may find that the robustness and resilience of these very same processes and systems perpetuates the harms of a disordered organization—we seem unable to change the failures that are only too evident. Health care in Canada and the United States is an obvious example. Likewise, journalism has traditionally been an indispensable form of accountability in democratic societies, a means whereby those in power in any sector can be subject to scrutiny they don’t invite. Yet we are living at a time when the institutions of journalism, having themselves become bureaucratic, are grappling with deep changes, loss of public trust, and full-scale decline. 

Practically, human-resource functions are often very challenging aspects of organizational life because they both introduce change and resist it. Ideally, they introduce change that is good and beneficial while resisting what is not. Functionally, the inverse can happen. Hiring processes can lead to staff who have been carefully filtered by pervasive standardization preferences. Reduction of liability and risk exposure becomes a greater priority as the organization grows. Automated recruiting and job-posting processes can accelerate the trend. In elected governments, key positions may be filled on the basis of alignment rather than merit. Gatekeepers can be appointed who are sympathetic to powerful supporters who want access to and control over decision-makers. 

Standardization is not compatible with deep innovation or disruptive change. When there is a requirement to fit in if you wish to remain, buttressed by a justification for doing only the things you have been asked to do without questioning anything, an organization is stagnating. Some standardization is, of course, needed, but the structural hazards require our individual attention and a degree of institutional vigilance. 

Language and perception gaps should be watched. Institutions may desire to hire the brightest and best only to place them in roles with little or no scope for those skills. Hiring highly creative people within very rigid and determined roles is an accident waiting to happen: the individual will pay the price, and institutional innovation will die on the vine. 

The Ouroboros: Questions for Discernment 

1. When unusual or creative options come up during meetings, are they explored with interest or is the first reaction “That won’t work here”? 
2. Is it easier to think of examples where creativity or difference was treated as a threat or where it was championed as a way forward? 
3. Do other organizations look to you or your team for insight and inspiration, or do you blend into the “industry standard” that ensures everyone stays in their lane? 

Absolute power deforms absolutely. The goblin shark has outlasted the dinosaurs and now lurks in the deep shadows of Davey Jones’s locker. With a proboscis like that, who could blame him? 

Certain individuals crave power. In the most extreme cases, this desire overtakes common-good impulses, moral codes, and relational trust. History is amply populated with examples of how organizations foster and feed such impulses. The logic is clear: power over other people and resources cannot be expanded very far without some form of cultural or social organizing to support it. The use of power for good is noble enough. The pathological side of institutions, however, often incentivizes the anti-social behaviours and instincts characteristic of those for whom control is the top priority. 

Institutions require hierarchy. Within hierarchy it is possible for higher-level leaders to exploit lower-level workers. This can happen in a wide range of ways where leaders have control over resources inherent to the institution. For example, senior members of a team can steal ideas from others in the organization by taking credit for what they did not produce. Through the exercise of company copyright rules and laws, non-disclosure agreements, and other instruments that ensure the “company” retains ownership of what is produced, such behaviour not only goes unchecked but is encouraged. The basic framework of these structures is sensible in principle. Yet the benefits of such unacknowledged ideas accrue to the senior member, leader, or owner, while the originating source is ignored, marginalized, or fully severed. The credit builds the power of the visible leader, while the source remains invisible and unrewarded. 

As the face of the organization, leaders are often able to block credit by ensuring the organization gets the light when needed, and that light just happens to shine where they are standing. Generic credit given to teams, departments, or divisions does little to offset the structural effects and may simply be one more means of building leadership credit while denigrating individual achievement. All group activities trade individual autonomy for the benefit of all, but where ego, organizational size, or control become excessive, this trade-off can shift attention toward power-seeking leaders to a far greater degree than is necessary. 

Power-seeking leaders are constantly concerned about being eclipsed by others and losing power. From their vantage point, they can find many ways to limit, sabotage, or interfere with those they control in order to retain and expand their power. But this is not just an individual’s disordered ambition. Processes and structures of organization enable this pathology. It is inherent to many institutional dynamics. Once those processes become the culture of the institution, the cost-benefit dynamics can move sharply in a “benefits upward” direction. Senior leaders need a certain amount of power and control to exercise their leadership, but the pathology becomes worrisome when that tendency is deepened by building layers of like-minded lieutenants who share an extractive rather than an enabling mindset. 

Innovation and experiment require novelty, new outcomes, unusual combinations, high risk, uncertainty, and intuition. These approaches are impaired when the control impulse of leadership is high. Creativity withers in such environments. Practically, employees may be affirmed verbally or through elaborate organizational statements while their structural role or responsibility for resource use is systematically reduced as the institution expands. Senior leaders may seek legal advice that affirms they are doing the right thing as long as they are not breaking any laws. Like the self-seeking habit endemic to most pathological behaviour, power-seeking leadership tends to set aside greater moral or social agreement in favour of maximizing benefits for a very specific circle. Even the law can be “adjusted” with sufficient investments and legal manoeuvring. 

Power seeking at the expense of all others does not happen only at the scale of empires. A manager at a fast-food restaurant could be equally culpable in kind, if not degree. Over time these habits can become institutionally embedded so that compliance with them is rewarded and opposition or critique punished. This incentive structure can lead institutions toward the kinds of pathologies that produce wide gaps in power between those at the top and those at the bottom of the organizational structure. 

The Goblin Shark: Questions for Discernment 

1. Where have I seen decisions made that benefit a few internally at the expense of the mission or purpose of the organization? 
2. When have I made decisions or taken actions that, on reflection, were about power seeking rather than serving? When have I been a sacrificial leader, serving others first? When have I been driven by my ego or my need to feel important? 
3. Do those in leadership roles demonstrate through actions that serving is a greater good than being served? 

Virtue signalling with a venomous after-bite, the cellar spider fakes its own death to lure innocent insect bystanders. Linger too long and you’ll become lunch.

 As noted above, being formally committed to a noble cause may cover senior-leadership compromises, but it also leads to another institutional pathology: manipulation of our desire to help others. Most organizations grow and develop because they contribute something of value. A range of governmental organizations, for instance, exist to provide service and support to citizens who need help. Education, health care, financial support, and public safety are vocations worth dedicating a life to. People will go above and beyond their formal expectations in many cases because what they do is more than just a job—they see it as the fulfillment of something greater. 

In some cases, however, organizations exploit this altruistic instinct by underpaying staff or treating them less carefully than they ought. Charities are de facto expressions of care for the common good, but individual organizations may unwittingly pass on cost savings by cutting staff short or requiring more of them than is reasonable. A humanitarian organization can leverage the urgency of their work to raise money both legitimately and through manipulation and in turn demand performance from their staff that is unsustainable because the work is so important. 

While an institution can have a mandate or a goal, the delivery of that work requires expenditures of time and effort. The concentration of power upward means senior leadership can overcommit and then offload the consequences of those overcommitments onto their teams. When such commitments are made, it is reasonable to consider who will be most affected by them. An analogue in the for-profit sector would be an aggressive campaign to sell more than the company can produce and then blaming the production side. 

In the very worst cases, an inarguably worthy purpose can inhibit the willingness of senior leadership to accept responsibility for what happens in their organization. Reasoning that what they do is indispensable and that the good delivered will be undermined by shedding light on anything untoward, they view “smaller” offences as sacrifices to be made for the greater good. This mindset produces a pathological culture that overlooks the personal ills of leaders or key members and makes excuses for various forms of abuse or neglect. The many examples of church leaders abusing or tolerating the abuse of people in their care suggest a common institutional calculation: it is less damaging to overlook such abuses than to bring them to light. 

Stresses and demands tend to amplify these patterns by reducing time for reflection or response and may produce a “solve at all costs” dynamic. Consider an analogy: Driving a car under optimum conditions without distractions and on a clear, sunny road while fully alert can’t eliminate the possibility of an accident, but it will significantly lower the probability. If it is windy with blowing snow, icy roads, and low visibility, and if the driver is exhausted and there are noisy passengers in the car, the probability of an accident is much higher. There is no margin to adjust and insufficient attention for care. Identifying when the behaviour of leaders or the effects of an institutional policy reduce the ability to respond well is vital but often lacking. Healthy and responsive institutions provide regular assessments of where the organizational load is being carried. Where pathologies have deepened and become embedded, those least able to make decisions will be the ones most affected by the decisions of others. 

The Cellar Spider: Questions for Discernment 

1. Have you ever stayed in a job because the work itself mattered even when it was clear that deep compromises or unethical practices were happening? 
2. Are there processes in place to get a clear understanding of how and where the institutional weight is being carried in delivering on commitments? 
3. Is your organizational culture characterized by a tone of “It’s only us” or “The work is more important than the pay”? Does that tone come from the people doing the work or those leading the organization? 

We all know honey badger don’t care. Honey badger don’t care about scale, infamously punching well above its weight class. 

When we consider the many different networks and environments we are part of in our lives, it isn’t surprising that institutional navigation can be challenging. The size and pace-of-change dynamic is vital for understanding institutional pathologies. A culture may involve millions of people over hundreds of years, while a small reading group may engage with a dozen people over a few months. Both will have conservative and inventive aspects, and both may have identifiable growth, development, and decline patterns; but the way in which those are expressed and how we respond to each will be quite different given the size and time differences. 

One way this matters to us is that the scale of dynamics can be confused by the language that is applied to them. For example, you may have a “bank” with twenty employees and another “bank” that has twenty thousand employees. They may have a significant common language (loans, insurance, mortgages, savings accounts, customers), but the dynamics to which these terms apply could be radically different. A “customer” is not in any way individual to the “bank” with twenty thousand employees, while a “customer” to the small, local bank may mean a neighbour, a cousin, an old classmate. Another way to think about this is to imagine a company with one hundred employees talking about their culture as a family. They may mean that they have a personal, warm, meaningful style of engagement, but it isn’t possible for a diverse workforce of one hundred people to be equivalent in dynamics and experience with an actual family that lives together, spans generations, and does not have an employee-employer dynamic. 

We experience the pathology of scale and language confusion when we assume that the large company with well-developed corporate language, volumes of human-resources regulations, and significant workplace policies is relationally equivalent to a committed circle of people who love, argue with, and care for each other. Normally we make these varied translations on the fly: we know the corporation we work for isn’t our family (though some within our small workplace circle can become like family) and that behaviour differences are required by each context. 

Problems with this mismatch can occur, however, when small organizations are expected to add policies and bureaucratic demands that originate in and are designed for large institutions, thus overburdening and impairing their function. A charity with fifty staff will have the capacity to provide detailed financial accounting for the government, while a charity with one half-time staff member will face a greater challenge in filling out those same forms. Large institutions such as insurance providers tend to develop tools and instruments that fit as wide a range of entities as possible, but that can mean a particular organization will find aspects of that insurance ill-suited to its needs. 

A large marketing department may utilize a range of tools to “listen” to a wide sector of society (thousands or millions), using population surveys that employ sophisticated forms of analysis such as averaging and segmenting. These departments may, however, completely miss a small but important signal that is lost in the sea of generalization. The trouble arises when the averaging of the input is then applied back to specific settings. The mismatch can lead to glaring misapplications of resources or policies. 

Our safe navigation of institutional pathologies requires a sharper awareness of the scales of our policies and procedures and the assumed logic that informs those decisions. Large systems are forced to standardize, streamline, and eradicate distinctions. Small structures are limited by their local concerns and modest impact. Neither is interchangeable with the other, though they are often assumed to be the same with just a difference of degree. This isn’t the case, and the confusion is costly. 

One scale is not inherently better or worse than the other. We need to improve our ability to understand what scale we are dealing with and how our policies need to adjust. Institutions have more mass, and that means they have significant conserving power—much more than a small group or informal organization has. That can be valuable if you want to provide a service or serve a mission beyond the working life of a given individual or want to influence more people, mobilize more resources, or gain more power and control. We need governmental institutions to ensure that all citizens pay their fair share of taxes as a contribution to the common good and that citizens have access to education, health care, and safe air travel. And we need that function to persist over long spans of time. The pathology arises when the mismatch is minimized or ignored. 

The Honey Badger: Questions for Discernment 

1. Does our organization have a way of differentiating policies and procedures based on size and scale? 
2. Are we a smaller organization that has more policies and procedures than necessary because we have not assessed our size and scale correctly? 
3. Do we have a clear sense of the different scales and dynamics that our day-to-day lives move in and out of? 

Conclusion 

Institutions are a fact of life, and we ought not begrudge their existence. Our contemporary lives are neither possible nor understandable apart from them. Yet their presence does not represent an unmitigated good. Every day we are affected by them in ways that are not beneficial. In leading or working within them we become complicit, to varying degrees, in their distortions and missteps. Mature and effective societal processes require greater literacy about the dangers that institutional creatures represent. This literacy includes widening the circle of people who think about, talk about, and experience structural dynamics across all scales. Growing our practical knowledge of institutional dynamics from the smallest to the largest scales can lead to more effective conservation of what is good and more capable opposition to what is harming us. 

All of us must accept a degree of responsibility for this work. We need to take a step or two closer to the ethical and moral dynamics that we are part of and that shape our lives. This must transcend a simplistic rejection of institutions or a gilded admiration of them. Identifying the pathologies above (there are certainly others) can foster greater maturity and accountability for senior leadership, boards, regulators, and gatekeepers in order that we might do better than we are currently. A future where we can deliver all that is needed for life to billions of people, adapt to both known and unknown disruptions, and generate the stability that our daily lives require must include an awareness of what institutional pathologies look like and how they can be addressed. A capable doctor seeks to understand health by recognizing disease. We must surely do the same in seeking the health of these social structures we live among.