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# Opening: what was working, and why did it stop
- URL: https://www.ariet.net/opening-what-was-working-and-why-did-it-stop/
- Published: 2026-10-05T21:05:02.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-05T21:05:02.000Z
- Author: Richard Thackeray
- Tags: Book

I have worked in and around large organisations for most of my career, and I have learned not to expect too much when I walk through the door of a new one. The politics settle in quickly, the early optimism fades, and within a few months the organisation reveals itself as it is rather than as it presented itself in the conversations that led to my joining. It is the nature of the work.

I have learned that although symptoms often appear the same, the situation is always unique, as it is a human system after all. Driven by the best and worst in people. So, I was prepared, and not, for what I found when I joined a large financial institution to lead the development of its architecture community.

On paper the situation was familiar. A large, distributed team of architects, 180 people across multiple continents, working in a system that had gradually marginalised them. They had been pushed to the edges of the work they were supposed to lead. Their role had contracted around compliance and control. The interesting conversations were happening without them. There was cynicism, there was disengagement, and there was the particular exhaustion that comes from being talented people in a system that does not quite know what to do with you.

I had seen this before. I thought I knew what to do but what I had not expected was what was already there.

Within weeks of starting, I set up a simple fortnightly session. No agenda. No slides. A standing invitation to anyone who wanted to come and talk about whatever was on their mind. I called them drop-ins, which was accurate enough, and I expected them to be quiet at first and grow slowly if they grew at all.

They were not quiet. From the first session something was present that I struggled to identify at the time. People arrived with things they wanted to say. A new joiner talking about the experience of finding her way into a system too complex to navigate alone. A senior architect describing the gap between the conversations he was having with engineers and the conversations his function was supposed to be having. Someone asking, not rhetorically, why the team had stopped feeling like a team.

These were not complaints. Or rather, they were complaints in the way that any personal account of a difficult situation is a complaint. It didn't feel like a grievance but an attempt to understand something, and do that with the support of colleagues. These people had been carrying these observations for months, possibly years, without anywhere to put them.

I gave them a room, a standing invitation, and the signal that any question was a legitimate question and things started to happen.

Over the months that followed I watched what happens when people who are good at their work are given the conditions to think together. The sessions found their own shape. Someone would arrive with something they had been reading. Someone else would connect it to a problem they were dealing with. A third person would push back, and from the creative tension something more useful than either starting position would emerge (Integrative Thinking some call it). Ideas that had been stuck in one part of the organisation started to move. People who had not previously known each other found they were working on adjacent problems and began to work on them together.

Some of this was by design (I had created themes that mattered to connect disparate teams) but most was the enthusiasm of the people; my colleagues and friends.

There was a session on cynicism, how to hold onto what you believed in when the system around you kept suggesting it was not worth the effort, and that generated more honest conversation in thirty minutes than I had seen in months of formal engagement. There was a session on courage. There was a session on what it meant to be curious, and whether curiosity could survive in a system that rewarded delivery and penalised questioning.

These were not community-building exercises. They were a community, doing what communities do when they are healthy, which is thinking, questioning, making sense of their experience together, and from that sense-making finding the energy to do their work better.

What I was watching, though I did not yet have the language for it, was what I would later call a fabric working.

This fabric building was not a programme, or a culture initiative with a steering group and a set of metrics. Despite attempts, it was not endorsed or sponsored, or I think even recognised, by the leadership above it, who were, during most of this period, engaged in other priorities and occasionally actively uncertain about whether this kind of activity was worth the time it consumed.

The fabric was a set of conditions. A regular rhythm that people could orient around. A space where exchange was welcome rather than managed. A network of relationships, gradually thickening, that allowed ideas and concerns to travel across the formal seams of the organisation. A social norm that said: your experience and your thinking are worth something, and we are interested in them.

These conditions had not been designed by anyone. They had emerged from a small number of people who kept showing up and kept their energetic and supportive engagement, and from the accumulated effect of many conversations that each seemed unremarkable and together became something that held people together.

And then it stopped as the signals from the top said that these people did not add value and the period of uncertainty lasted months and months.

It did not stop all at once. It stopped the way most things stop in large organisations: gradually, and then faster than you expected. The uncertainty about the organisation's future began to make people cautious. The people who connected across boundaries, those who carried ideas from one part of the system to another, who were present in conversations that were not strictly their job, began to be seen as a cost rather than a mechanism. The sessions continued, but something had changed. The watercooler conversations, which had been spaces for sense-making, became spaces for anxiety instead. The energy that had been present in the room began to drain away.

Some glue roles had already been removed; analysts, project managers, and now it was the turn of architects. Not in one announcement, but in the gradual and distant arithmetic of reorganisation. The people who had been doing the connecting work found that the connecting work was not what the metrics were measuring, and so the connecting work stopped being protected. When the connecting started to stop, the diffusion of ideas stopped with it and when the diffusion stopped, the belief that the effort was worth making began to erode. And when the belief eroded, people looked inward, toward the work they could control and the relationships they were sure of, and the community began to contract toward its smallest possible version of itself.

I have thought about this sequence a great deal since.

What I had witnessed was not a failure of the people involved. The architects I worked with were talented, committed, and motivated to do work that mattered. What I had witnessed was the absence of something, or rather, the presence of something that had not been built deliberately and therefore could not be protected when the pressure came.

The conditions that had allowed the community to thrive had not been designed or nurtured and kept viable. They had arrived partly through my own efforts, partly through the generosity of the people who showed up, and partly through luck; the luck of timing, of relationships, of a window in the organisation's attention that briefly allowed something to take root.

This is the question this book is trying to answer. Not why did it fail, and I did write about that failure to my colleagues and friends, but what was it? What had been present in those sessions that made them worth attending, that made the ideas flow and the energy hold and the people feel, for a while, that they were part of something worth being part of? Could that thing, whatever it was, be built deliberately, in a way that did not depend on the particular window or the particular people or the particular moment of luck?

A large part of this was community, lovely community and a joy to be part of, but I feel it is more than that and leaders of all levels of seniority have a big part to play to recognise it and keep it viable.

Can it be built deliberately? I think it can. I think it has to be. I think the reason most organisations never build it is not that they lack the will but that they have never quite noticed what it is they are missing.

That is what the rest of this book attempts to do.