(2026-05-17) Brodmerkel How Organisations Teach Us Not To Think

Sven Brodmerkel: How Organizations Teach Us Not to Think. Part 2 of a series on why (smart) organizations do strange things to smart people. (2026-05-12) Brodmerkel Why Competent People Disappear: Functional Stupidity And The Invisible Professional Picture a problem you’ve flagged before. Not once. Several times. With evidence, with context, with a clearly articulated explanation of why this keeps happening and what would need to change to stop it happening again.

And each time, something got fixed. Sort of. A workaround was implemented.
And then it came back.

In a slightly different form, wearing a slightly different hat, but unmistakably the same problem — because the thing that kept producing it was never actually addressed.

That distinction — between fixing the error and questioning the assumption that created the error — is at the heart of one of the most important and most consistently ignored ideas in organizational theory.

And it has a name.

Chris Argyris was a professor at Yale School of Management and Harvard Business School for the better part of four decades — one of the most influential organizational theorists of the twentieth century, and someone who spent his career documenting, with considerable precision, why organizations systematically fail to learn from their own experience.

His central contribution was a deceptively simple distinction: single-loop learning versus double-loop learning.

A thermostat that turns the heating on when the room drops below twenty degrees is doing single-loop learning. It detects an error — room too cold — and corrects it. Job done

A thermostat capable of double-loop learning would do something more sophisticated and potentially uncomfortable: it would ask whether twenty degrees is actually the right target. Whether the room should be this temperature at all. Whether the whole heating strategy needs rethinking. (meta)

Single-loop: fix the error. Double-loop: question the assumption that produced the error.

Both are forms of learning. But only one of them is threatening to the people who set the thermostat.

Defensive routines — or, how organizations get very good at avoiding the obvious

I want to be honest about what it costs to think this way in a single-loop organization, because the cost is real and it doesn’t help anyone to minimise it.

The double-loop thinker pays a reflexivity tax — in social capital, in political positioning, in the slow accumulation of being-perceived-as-difficult, and in the exhausting cognitive labour of constantly translating their thinking into formats the organization can receive without feeling threatened. (reflective practitioner)

So what do you actually do?

Neurodivergent professionals often have a genuinely hard time participating in organizational defensive routines. Not because they’re socially obtuse — though that’s a convenient story — but because the avoidance of the obvious is confusing to them in a way it isn’t to everyone else.

Over time, this tax compounds. Some double-loop thinkers learn to suppress the deeper question and adapt to single-loop norms.

The most immediately useful thing Argyris’s framework offers is diagnostic clarity. When you’re in a conversation, a meeting, a strategic discussion — you can now ask: is this a single-loop conversation or a double-loop one? Is this a space where the deeper question is actually on the table, or is this a space where the task is to fix the symptom and move on?

four genuine reframes — drawn from Argyris’s framework — that I think make the situation navigable without requiring you to either pretend the problem doesn’t exist or exhaust yourself fighting it alone.

In many cases, this is not a communication failure on the part of the person who can see the elephant. It is a collective performance of selective attention that the defensive routine requires, and that neurotypical social conditioning makes feel natural.

organizations don’t just happen to stay in single-loop mode. They actively — if unconsciously — protect it. Argyris called the mechanisms that do this organizational defensive routines: the elaborate, largely unspoken systems that prevent double-loop questions from gaining any traction.

For neurodivergent professionals, the performance doesn’t feel natural. It feels bizarre. And the social cost of not performing it — of saying, calmly and sincerely, I’m sorry, but there is an elephant — is real and cumulative.

They emerge organically from the collective human need to avoid embarrassment, protect established positions, and keep uncomfortable truths at a comfortable distance.

Others keep asking the double-loop question and absorb the ongoing social cost.

The elephant-namer isn’t the problem.
The room that decided not to see the elephant is the problem. ThereAreFourLights

They operate through what Argyris called, with characteristic precision, skilled incompetence — people becoming extraordinarily practised at avoiding the conversations that would actually solve the problem. The avoidance is so fluent, so professionally executed, that it looks like normal organizational behaviour. It is normal organizational behaviour

Name the loop you’re in.

The double-loop thinker — the one who keeps asking but why does this keep happening? — doesn’t just create friction in this environment. They actively threaten the defensive routine.

The double-loop tax

They get managed. Labelled. Sidelined. Described, in tones of genuine puzzlement, as brilliant but difficult.

A particular word about neurodivergent professionals — again

Defensive routines are not conspiracy. Nobody designs them.

Pick your double-loop moments

developing a feel for when the organization has enough slack, enough trust, enough psychological safety to actually hear the question beneath the question — is a skill, and it is not a compromise.

There’s a version of this that is pure capitulation: never asking the double-loop question because it’s always inconvenient. That’s not what I’m describing.

Find your double-loop allies.

They exist in almost every organization. The pockets of genuine reflection are real — the colleagues who also notice the elephant, the managers who actually want to know why the boulder keeps rolling back, the teams where the defensive routines are thinner or less entrenched.
Finding these people is not a nice-to-have. It is survival infrastructure. The double-loop thinker in a single-loop organization needs somewhere to be fully cognitively present without paying the full reflexivity tax on every exchange. Those pockets are where you stay sane, stay sharp, and stay connected to the possibility that the deeper question might, eventually, land somewhere.

Know what you’re actually dealing with.

This is the hardest one, and the most important.

If the defensive routines are total... that is important information. Not about your communication style. Not about your fit, your attitude, or your ability to “manage up.” About the organization.

Some organizations are genuinely capable of double-loop learning and are simply not doing it yet. Others have organised themselves so completely around single-loop thinking that the defensive routines are load-bearing — the whole structure depends on the deeper question not being asked.

Knowing which one you’re in is the difference between a renovation project and a decision to find a different building. (Change Your Organization)

Back to Sisyphus

here is the thing about Sisyphus that the myth doesn’t quite capture: he is not the only person on the hill.
There are people at the bottom of the hill asking why the boulder keeps rolling back down. There are people questioning whether this is the right hill. There are people who have drawn a detailed map of the slope and are waiting for someone with authority to look at it.
These people are not Sisyphus. They are not tragic heroes condemned to repetition.
They are the ones who could solve the problem — if anyone would ask why it keeps happening.

You are not the problem.
The assumption that the slope is non-negotiable is the problem.
And some of us were never very good at treating obviously questionable assumptions as if they were settled facts.
Good

Further reading:
Argyris, C. (1990). Overcoming organizational defenses: Facilitating organizational learning. Allyn and Bacon.
Argyris, C. (1991). Teaching smart people how to learn. Harvard Business Review, 69(3), 99–109.