(2026-06-15) Brodmerkel Why Sensible Suggestions Get Strange Reactions

Sven Brodmerkel: Why Sensible Suggestions Get Strange Reactions. Part 6 of a series on why (smart) organisations do strange things to smart people. (2026-05-12) Brodmerkel Why Competent People Disappear: Functional Stupidity And The Invisible Professional

Picture a Tuesday.
Not a dramatic Tuesday.

You need to make a decision. It is not a large decision.

But before it can be enacted, it has to go through a process. The process involves a form. The form requires three signatures. Two of the signatories are in a meeting about a previous decision that also required three signatures. The third can sign, but not until the other two have signed, because that is the order in which the signatures must appear.
You sit with your completed form and your already‑made decision and think, not for the first time: what, exactly, is the point of any of this?

Here’s what I want to suggest: there is a point. But it’s probably not the point you think.

A London hospital, 1959, and a consultant who found something nobody expected

In the late 1950s, a London teaching hospital had a problem.
Nurses were leaving. Not in the usual steady trickle of staff turnover that organisations absorb, but in numbers alarming enough to worry the administration

Management brought in a consultant to find out why.
The consultant was Isabel Menzies Lyth, a British psychoanalyst at the Tavistock Institute, shaped by the Kleinian tradition and particularly interested in what happens when psychoanalytic thinking is applied to organisational life.

What she found was not what anyone expected.
Menzies Lyth published her findings in 1960 in a paper titled Social Systems as a Defence Against Anxiety. It is not a long paper. It is, however, one that, once read, tends to reframe how you see organisations.

What she found in the hospital

Nursing, then as now, is genuinely anxiety‑provoking work. You are in close, sustained contact with human suffering, with death, and with the consequences of medical decisions going well or badly.

What Menzies Lyth observed was that the hospital had organised itself, largely unconsciously, to manage that anxiety. The structures, rituals, and cultural norms were not only about delivering care; they also helped make the anxiety of nursing bearable.

The mechanisms were specific and recognisable:

Depersonalisation. Patients were referred to not as individuals but as conditions and locations

Ritual task performance. Nurses were given lists of specific tasks across multiple patients, rather than holistic responsibility for individual patients

Enforced emotional detachment. Visible emotional involvement with patients was discouraged as unprofessional. Distance was treated as the norm.

These were not just inefficiencies. They were a kind of social defence: an unconscious organisational architecture built to make difficult work feel survivable.

Diffusion of decision‑making. Decisions were escalated, referred, checked, double‑checked, and countersigned until it was hard for any single person to own them.

The structures were doing something.

In the narrow sense, they were helping keep the acute anxiety of direct human contact at a manageable level. But they were also preventing nurses from experiencing the things that make nursing meaningful: connection, presence, and the satisfaction of genuinely helping someone in a difficult moment.

The work remained demanding, but much of its human reward was managed away with its emotional risk. What remained was a kind of hollowness: going through the motions of care in a system that had become organised to prevent too much caring.

Menzies Lyth’s deeper insight is that these defensive systems are self‑reinforcing. The more anxiety the organisation generates through its own structure, the more it relies on that structure to manage it. The bureaucracy produces discomfort and then points to that discomfort as evidence that more bureaucracy is needed.

The general pattern

Most professional work carries genuine anxiety. Not the acute existential anxiety of nursing, but anxiety nonetheless

Organisations develop social defences around that anxiety too.

The three‑signature approval process may not exist because it produces better decisions. It may exist because it distributes responsibility so thoroughly that no one person has to own the outcome

The meeting about the meeting may not be a productive use of time. It may be a way for the group to check, collectively and repeatedly, that everyone is aligned and that no one is alone in the risk. It is a stabilising ritual.

The jargon — the frameworks, acronyms, and the elaborate vocabulary of process and methodology — may help specialists communicate. But it also creates a layer of abstraction between people and the human stakes of the work.

None of these structures are stupid. They are doing a job. Understanding the job they do is different from endorsing them, but the distinction matters, because otherwise you spend a great deal of energy being baffled by things that have a coherent, if often unconscious, logic.

A word about neurodivergent professionals

I keep returning to this because the Menzies Lyth frame may be one of the most clarifying in the series for neurodivergent readers.

The rituals that feel arbitrary to you — the ones you mentally flag as inefficient, redundant, or inexplicable — may be relevant for your colleagues in a way you are not experiencing.

anxiety those rituals are managing is real, and the rituals are, however imperfectly, helping to contain it.

If you do not share the same anxiety profile — if uncertainty does not register as threatening in the same way, if the absence of rigid process feels like freedom rather than exposure, and if owning a decision alone feels energising rather than alarming — then the rituals will seem to be solving a problem you do not have.
That is exactly what makes them so baffling.

And it is also why dismantling them, or even simply failing to participate in them convincingly, can produce a reaction that feels wildly disproportionate to the provocation. You were not critiquing a process. From the perspective of the people for whom that process is a safety net, you seem to be pulling it away.

This is not an argument that the safety nets should never come down. Some should. Some are overdue for being stored away. But it is an argument for understanding what a safety net is supporting before you remove it, and for extending a kind of psychological empathy to the people whose anxiety the net was built to safeguard.

What this costs you

The first is the participation tax: being asked to perform rituals whose anxiety‑management function you do not share, and whose inefficiency you cannot stop noticing, is draining

You are not performing the same ritual they are. You are performing a performance of the ritual.

The second is the disruption penalty. The person who points out, accurately and helpfully, that the three‑signature process could be streamlined is not experienced as offering useful efficiency advice. They are experienced as threatening something that is holding anxiety in place.

What grounded confidence looks like here

Three things actually help.

Distinguish the ritual from the anxiety it is managing.

Once you can see what the ritual is doing, you have another option: engage the underlying anxiety directly, rather than arguing only with the ritual.

Choose your safeguard-challenges carefully.

Some organisational defences are worth dismantling because they produce more anxiety than they manage, have outlasted the conditions that created them, or cost too much to maintain. Others are genuinely holding things together. Developing the judgement to tell the difference is not a compromise.

Build your own regulatory infrastructure.

Knowing what actually regulates your nervous system, and building access to it independently of organisational structures, means you are not left without infrastructure when the official one does not work for you.
This might be physical movement, music, focused solo work, or a conversation with someone who actually understands the problem.

Back to Tuesday

The forms. The signatures. The meeting about the meeting.

Once you know what job it is actually doing, two things become possible that weren’t before.

You can stop being baffled by it.

And you can stop taking it personally. The system was not organised around the work alone. It was organised around helping people survive the work. That is a very human thing to do. But it is not always an effective thing to do, as Menzies Lyth’s nurses discovered at considerable personal cost.