There is a scene in Blazing Saddles where a room of officials, accused of not caring, respond in unison with a harrumph. Nobody disagrees. Nobody acts. The noise itself is the compliance.
It is a useful image for anyone who has sat in a board meeting after a serious incident. The concern in the room is real. The language is careful and sincere. An action is logged, an owner is named, a date is set. Six months later the same theme appears in a different report with a different owner, and the room makes the same sound.
A failure of consequence, not of intent
This is not usually a failure of intent. It is a failure of consequence. Organisations are good at registering that something has been said and poor at establishing what changed because of it. The paperwork records the concern; it does not record the decision the concern should have altered.
Three things that tend to be true
Wherever this pattern holds, the same three conditions are usually present.
- The person who raised the concern is never told what happened next.
- The action is written so broadly that its completion can be claimed without anything being different.
- Nobody in the room has responsibility for noticing that the same theme has now appeared three times.
Why it survives
None of those are hard to fix, which is the uncomfortable part. Closing the loop with the person who spoke up costs a phone call. Writing an action that names the decision it should change costs a sentence. Reading last year’s themes before this year’s report costs an afternoon.
Performative concern is cheaper than all three, and it feels almost identical from the inside. That is why it survives.
