The Hidden Order of Operation That Shapes How Organizations Think, Decide, and Change
Randal Evans | randalevans.com/writing
Every organization I’ve worked with runs on an implicit sequence: something comes first, and everything else follows from it. Most of the time, that sequence operates below the surface of strategy, governance, and planning conversations– invisible until something goes wrong, or until you’ve seen the same pattern enough times to recognize it before it does.
What I’ve come to think of as the difference between identity-first and principles-first organizations is that underlying sequence. It may be the single most consequential architectural feature of an institution that almost no one deliberately designs.
The clearest way I know to see this distinction is through a story. Not a cautionary tale, and not a success story either– something more honest than either of those.
The Long Shadow in a Community Anchor
In the early years, the organization looked like many community-born efforts: a small circle of local residents responding to a gap in services, making decisions in living rooms and church basements, rotating roles so no one voice dominated. Their practices– circles, consensus, mutual aid– weren’t just style. They were how the community protected itself against any one person speaking for everyone. The structure reflected something the founders understood, perhaps intuitively, about what made their work trustworthy: shared commitments, held collectively, came first. Identity followed from practice.
Then a charismatic outsider arrived. She had a gift for narrative, strong ties to funders, and the confidence to move comfortably in rooms the founding group found intimidating. Grants followed. Programs multiplied. Within a decade, what had begun as a community effort had become a regionally recognized anchor institution. From the outside, the arc looked like unambiguous success: more sites, more staff, more people served each year.
Inside, the center of gravity shifted. Over time, almost every consequential decision– strategy, senior hires, board nominations, public positions– ran through this one leader. The board, once a forum for community deliberation, became more of a sounding board, asked to affirm a vision rather than to shape it. Staff learned that certain questions landed well and others did not. Turnover quietly climbed. Longtime community members noticed that the organization now introduced itself less as one voice in a network and more as the voice for the community in the region.
The language shifted too. “Stakeholder engagement” and “community voice” appeared in annual reports, grant narratives, and press coverage, even as the internal reality moved steadily toward a single center of gravity.
The leader sincerely believed she was honoring the community’s story. She often framed herself as a founder and as someone deeply rooted in the community, even though neither was strictly accurate. The organization’s materials echoed this: facilities and initiatives carried her name and reflected her vision, and the public-facing origin story increasingly spotlighted her arrival as the turning point.
It’s worth pausing on the word “sincerely.” This isn’t a story about deception or self-serving leadership in any simple sense. What I’ve observed, across many situations like this one, is that the people at the center of these dynamics genuinely believe the story they’re telling. They experience themselves as custodians of something important. That’s partly what makes the pattern so durable– and so hard to see from the inside.
It was not that nothing good happened. On many measures, the organization did real, important work over three-and-a-half decades. The costs are harder to see: opportunities that never quite made it onto the agenda, smaller community efforts crowded out of funder attention, younger leaders who did not find a path to shape the work without first aligning with someone else’s narrative. The board, however capable its individual members, operated within a system where the implicit first question was always “How does this fit who we are?”– and “who we are” had become increasingly synonymous with a single person’s vision of the organization’s place in the world.
This is what identity-first capture looks like in practice. Not a villain seizing control, but a structure that gradually reorients itself around protecting a story– a story that, in this case, happened to center on one person, but that could just as easily center on a founding family’s legacy, a historical program model, or a coalition’s preferred narrative. The mechanism is the same: the organization’s primary filter shifts from “What do our commitments require here?” to “Does this fit who we are?” Those two questions sound similar. They produce very different institutions.
The Underground Current
When the leader eventually retired, the transition was smoother than many that follow long tenures like hers. This is worth naming because it is not the typical arc. Organizations built around a single dominant identity often face years of instability after that identity departs– sometimes because the departing leader, consciously or not, leaves conditions that make succession difficult. Institutional memory concentrated in one person, governance muscles that haven’t been exercised, a culture where hard questions were managed rather than welcomed: these are the structural inheritances that make recovery slow and uncertain.
What made this transition different was something that had persisted underneath the dominant narrative for years– a small number of board members and senior staff who had quietly held onto the organization’s original character. They hadn’t been able to change the dominant pattern while it was operating at full force. But they had kept something alive: a set of relationships, a set of questions, a memory of what the organization had been built to do before it became primarily about sustaining the story of one leader. When the moment came, that underground continuity was what made a different kind of succession possible.
A successor with deeper community roots stepped in. Public language softened from “the” voice to “one of several” partners. Internal practices began tilting back toward shared input, distributed leadership, and more honest engagement with the communities the organization served. The institution survived– and in some ways, found its way back to something closer to what it had originally been. The long shadow of a personality-centered era lingered in small ways, as it always does. But the underlying sequence had shifted.
What the Research Helps Explain
I want to be careful not to turn this story into a framework before it’s had a chance to land. But a few observations from research are worth naming, not to explain the story away but to help locate it within a larger pattern.
Michael Tomasello’s work on shared intentionality– the specifically human capacity to form joint commitments, coordinate around shared goals, and build meaning together across difference– offers one useful lens. His research suggests that what distinguishes human collaboration from every other form of social coordination isn’t intelligence or language alone; it’s the ability to hold a shared “we” that is larger than any individual’s perspective or identity. The founding practices of this organization– circles, rotating roles, consensus– were, in this sense, a practical application of that capacity. The identity-first era, whatever its accomplishments, gradually suppressed it.
Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work on constructed emotion and identity adds a related observation: the brain doesn’t discover a fixed “self”– it actively constructs one, continuously, using available concepts, relationships, and social contexts. What we call organizational identity works similarly. It isn’t a thing that exists prior to practice and then gets expressed through it; it’s an ongoing project, shaped by every decision about who speaks, what gets questioned, and what kinds of conversations are allowed. When an organization treats its identity as a fixed asset to be protected, it is, in a sense, working against the grain of how both minds and institutions actually operate.
None of this requires bad intent. That’s perhaps the most important structural observation: the identity-first pattern doesn’t depend on anyone meaning harm. It can develop just as readily in organizations led by people of genuine purpose and authentic commitment to the communities they serve. The question isn’t whether the people involved are good or bad; it’s whether the organization’s implicit first question is protecting a story or honoring a commitment. Those are different things, and they produce different institutions, regardless of the intentions behind them.
The Pattern Shows Up Everywhere
This composite is drawn loosely from situations I’ve encountered over 25 years across very different organizational, geographic, and cultural contexts. The specific features– the community-born founding, the charismatic arrival, the long tenure, the underground continuity– aren’t universal. But the underlying dynamic is.
I’ve seen a version of it in donor families where the founding generation’s philanthropic story has become the primary filter for every subsequent decision– not because the next generation doesn’t care about the mission, but because “what Grandmother would have wanted” has become more operationally powerful than any explicit statement of shared commitments. The family in the Whitfield Foundation narrative I’ve written about elsewhere didn’t face a charismatic outsider or a capture moment in any dramatic sense. What they missed was simply the conversation– the deliberate practice of naming principles that could hold the work together across generations, and building structures that invited those principles to do real work rather than leaving the organization’s continuity to depend on the transmission of a story.
I’ve seen it in boards that cannot absorb uncomfortable data because it threatens the organization’s self-image as high-performing and community-trusted. I’ve seen it in advisory relationships where the real question– “What does this family actually care about, and how do we build something that reflects that?”– gets quietly replaced by the more comfortable one: “How do we tell the story of this family’s impact?” The shift from one question to the other can happen without anyone noticing. It doesn’t require a dramatic turning point. It just requires that the story be treated, consistently, as the thing that comes first.
What a Different Sequence Makes Possible
The organizations I’ve seen navigate this most gracefully aren’t the ones that stopped caring about their story. Identity matters. Continuity matters. The sense of “who we are” is a real and important resource for the people who make up an institution. The difference isn’t between organizations that have a strong identity and those that don’t. It’s between organizations whose identity is the thing being protected and those whose identity is allowed to be the ongoing result of living shared commitments in public over time.
In the second kind of organization, “who we are” is always, to some degree, an open question– not because the organization lacks conviction, but because it takes its commitments seriously enough to let the story change when the commitments require it. The underground current in this composite– those board members and staff who held onto something through the identity-centered era– were doing something like that. They weren’t protecting the story. They were keeping the commitments alive until there was enough space to let them reshape the story.
That’s a subtle distinction, and it’s one I’m still working out. What conditions make it possible for an organization to hold that kind of underground continuity through a long identity-centered period? What governance structures, what conversational practices, what relationships make the difference between an institution that can find its way back and one that can’t? Nowhere does this question have higher stakes than in formal governance– in boardrooms where the structure of authority and the weight of institutional narrative carry extra force, and where the principles-first or identity-first sequence shapes not just culture but legal accountability and the board’s capacity to steward purpose across time. That’s territory I’m exploring in more depth in subsequent work.
For now, the question I keep returning to is simpler: what would it mean for an organization to take its stated commitments seriously enough that the story had to change? Not as a crisis, not as a loss– but as evidence that the principles were actually doing their job.
For Further Reading
Tomasello, Michael. Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny. Harvard University Press, 2019. The most accessible synthesis of Tomasello’s research on shared intentionality and the cognitive foundations of human cooperation.
Barrett, Lisa Feldman. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. Barrett’s account of constructed emotion and identity offers a rigorous basis for understanding why “who we are” is always a project rather than a discovery.
Bushe, Gervase R. and Robert J. Marshak, eds. Dialogic Organization Development: The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change. Berrett-Koehler, 2015. The foundational text for the dialogic OD tradition, including the “organizations as meaning-making networks” frame that informs this piece.
Randal Evans is a philanthropic and legal counselor, strategic advisor, and Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy® (CAP®) based in Scottsdale, Arizona. He works with families, foundations, and mission-driven organizations on charitable planning, governance, and leadership. More at randalevans.com.