Why Organisations Can’t Examine Their Own Assumptions
The memeplex protects itself—and it’s far more sophisticated at doing so than most people realise.
Have you ever watched an organisation commission a ‘culture survey’, receive results that point to deep structural problems, and then… do absolutely nothing about it? Or perhaps you’ve seen a team sit through a retrospective, carefully dancing around the one issue everyone knows is the real problem?
This isn’t a failure of courage, though it looks like one. It’s something far more interesting—and far more difficult to address. Organisations cannot easily examine their own assumptions because the very apparatus they would use to conduct the examination is itself constructed from those assumptions. It’s like asking someone to see their own blind spot using the eye that has the blind spot.
Argyris Saw This Decades Ago
Chris Argyris spent his career documenting what he called defensive routines—the organisational habits that prevent people from examining the assumptions underlying their actions. His insight was deceptively simple and devastatingly accurate: organisations develop systematic ways of avoiding embarrassment or threat, and then develop further routines to prevent anyone from discussing the fact that they’re avoiding things.
He called this skilled incompetence. People become extraordinarily proficient at preventing learning. Not because they’re stupid or malicious, but because the social systems they inhabit reward the appearance of confidence and punish the admission of uncertainty. When a senior leader says ‘I want honest feedback’, every person in the room is running a rapid calculation about what kind of honesty is actually safe. The espoused theory is openness. The theory-in-use is self-protection.
What makes Argyris’s work so enduring is his observation that these defensive patterns are self-sealing. They contain their own protection mechanism. If you try to point out that a team is being defensive, the team will defend against that observation. If you note that the organisation avoids discussing its avoidance, that meta-observation itself becomes undiscussable. It’s undiscussability all the way down.
The Memeplex Dimension
Memeology takes this further by examining what these defensive routines are actually protecting. Organisations don’t just have scattered beliefs and assumptions floating around independently. They have memeplexes—interlocking systems of collective beliefs that reinforce one another and form a coherent yet unexamined) worldview.
Consider an organisation that holds the following beliefs simultaneously: that managers exist because workers cannot be trusted to self-organise; that detailed planning prevents failure; that individual performance metrics drive results; and that hierarchy reflects competence. None of these beliefs exists in isolation. Each one supports and is supported by the others. Together, they form a memeplex—a self-reinforcing ecology of assumptions that shapes every decision, every process, every interaction.
Now imagine someone proposes examining one of these beliefs. Say someone suggests that perhaps workers could self-organise under the right conditions. This doesn’t just challenge one assumption. It sends tremors through the entire system. If workers can self-organise, why do we need the current management structure? If the management structure isn’t necessary, what does that mean for our planning processes? If detailed planning isn’t essential, what happens to the metrics we’ve built around plan adherence? Each belief is load-bearing for every other belief. Pull one out and the people embedded in the system feel, often unconsciously, that the whole thing might collapse.
This is why surfacing collective beliefs feels so threatening. It’s not that any single assumption is too sacred to question. It’s that the assumptions form a web, and touching any strand vibrates the whole structure. The memeplex protects itself not through any conscious conspiracy but through the sheer interconnectedness of its components.
Why It Feels Like an Attack
When someone attempts genuine examination of organisational assumptions, several things happen simultaneously that make the experience feel existential rather than intellectual.
Identity is at stake. People’s professional identities are woven into the memeplex. If you’ve built a career on the assumption that rigorous planning prevents failure, questioning that assumption isn’t an abstract exercise—it’s a potential invalidation of decades of professional life. The defensive response isn’t irrational. It’s deeply human.
Social contracts are threatened. Every memeplex comes with implicit social agreements about how things work around here. Who gets to decide. Who has status. Who is considered competent and why. Examining these assumptions means potentially renegotiating every social contract in the organisation simultaneously. That’s terrifying, even if no one articulates it that way.
The familiar becomes uncertain. A memeplex, however dysfunctional, provides predictability. People know what to expect, how to behave, what will be rewarded and punished. Even an unhappy certainty often feels safer than an uncertain possibility of something better. The devil you know, as they say.
Cognitive dissonance has a half-life. Organisations that do begin to examine their assumptions often find themselves in a deeply uncomfortable intermediate state—holding two incompatible belief systems simultaneously. This state of organisational cognitive dissonance is so painful that it typically resolves within about nine months, but not always in the direction of learning. Often, the organisation snaps back to its original beliefs, having expelled or marginalised the sources of the new perspective.
The Rarity of Genuine Self-Reflection
So what makes some rare organisations capable of genuine self-reflection whilst most treat any examination as an attack?
It isn’t intelligence. It isn’t resources. It isn’t even what most people mean when they say ‘psychological safety’, though that’s closer.
The organisations that manage genuine self-reflection typically share several characteristics that work together rather than in isolation.
They have developed a practice—not just a permission—of surfacing assumptions. There’s a fundamental difference between a leader saying ‘we welcome challenge’ and an organisation that has built regular, structured practices for making the implicit explicit. Memeology as a practice isn’t about one-off workshops. It’s about cultivating an ongoing organisational habit of noticing, naming, and examining collective beliefs. The practice itself must become part of the memeplex if it is to survive.
They treat beliefs as hypotheses rather than identities. In these rare organisations, people have somehow learnt to hold their assumptions lightly—to say ‘we currently operate as though X is true’ rather than ‘X is true and I am the kind of person who believes X’. This distinction matters enormously. You can revise a hypothesis without an identity crisis. You cannot revise a core identity without such a crisis.
They attend to the therapeutic relationship. This may sound strange in an organisational context, but it’s central. Genuine self-examination requires the same conditions that effective therapy requires: voluntary participation, trust, a relationship that can hold difficult truths without rupturing. You cannot force an organisation into self-examination any more than you can force a psychotherapy patient into insight. The people facilitating this work understand that it is the quality of the relationship—not any specific technique or framework—that enables transformation.
They have sufficient safety to tolerate the in-between. These organisations have somehow built enough resilience to survive the cognitive dissonance phase—that agonising period where old assumptions have been questioned but new ones haven’t yet solidified. Most organisations panic during this phase and retreat to the familiar. The ones that don’t panic have typically built strong enough relationships, enough trust, and enough shared commitment to the process that they can sit with uncertainty long enough for something new to emerge.
They don’t try to swap individual memes. Perhaps most importantly, these organisations understand that you cannot simply replace one belief with another whilst leaving the rest of the memeplex intact. You cannot graft ‘self-organisation’ onto a command-and-control memeplex and expect it to take. The organisations that achieve genuine self-reflection understand that they’re working with a system, not a collection of independent parts.
The Paradox at the Heart of It All
Here’s what makes this work so genuinely difficult: the very capacity to examine assumptions is itself shaped by assumptions. An organisation that assumes people cannot be trusted will not trust people to examine its assumptions. An organisation that assumes expertise resides at the top will only accept examination conducted by those at the top—who, by definition, have the most invested in the current memeplex.
This is why external facilitation can help, but only if it’s the right kind. The wrong kind of external help—the kind that arrives with a diagnosis and a prescription—simply reinforces the existing memeplex by confirming the assumption that solutions come from experts. The right kind creates conditions where the organisation can see itself more clearly, reach its own insights, and choose its own path forward.
This is the core insight that connects Argyris’s defensive routines to Memeology: you cannot think your way out of assumptions using thinking that is itself assumption-laden. You need a different kind of process altogether—one that is relational rather than analytical, experiential rather than intellectual, emergent rather than prescribed.
What This Means in Practice
If you’re in an organisation and you recognise these patterns—the undiscussable topics, the defensive routines that everyone can see but no one mentions, the memeplex that shapes everything whilst remaining invisible—what can you do?
First, recognise that you cannot simply decide to fix this. The desire to ‘fix the culture’ is itself usually an expression of the existing memeplex—the belief that problems have solutions, that solutions can be implemented, that implementation is a matter of will and competence. Sometimes the most important step is to stop trying to fix and start trying to notice.
Second, find others who also notice. Not to form a revolutionary cell, but to create a small space where assumptions can be spoken aloud without immediate consequence. A space where someone can say ‘I notice that we say we value innovation but we punish every failed experiment’ and have that observation received with curiosity rather than defensiveness.
Third, understand that this is slow work. Memeplexes evolved over years or decades. They will not be transformed by a two-day offsite. The organisations that achieve genuine self-reflection have typically been building the capacity for it over a long period, often with significant help from people who understand the therapeutic dimension of organisational change.
And finally, be gentle—with yourself and with others. Defensive routines exist because people are trying to protect themselves from genuine pain. The goal isn’t to strip away defences and leave people exposed. It’s to create conditions where the defences become less necessary, because the environment has become safe enough to be honest in.
The memeplex will protect itself. That’s what memeplexes do. But with patience, skill, and a deep respect for the human beings embedded in these systems, it is possible—rare, but possible—to create the conditions where organisations can genuinely see themselves. Not as an act of will, but as an emergent property of relationships built on trust, curiosity, and a willingness to sit with the discomfort of not yet knowing what comes next.
Further Reading
Argyris, C. (1990). Overcoming organizational defenses: Facilitating organizational learning. Allyn & Bacon.
Argyris, C. (1991). Teaching smart people how to learn. Harvard Business Review, 69(3), 99–109.
Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A. (1996). Organizational learning II: Theory, method, and practice. Addison-Wesley.
Marshall, R. W. (2018). Hearts over diamonds: Serving business and society through organisational psychotherapy. Leanpub.
Marshall, R. W. (2021). Memeology: Surfacing and reflecting on the organisation’s collective assumptions and beliefs. Leanpub.
Noonan, W. R. (2007). Discussing the undiscussable: A guide to overcoming defensive routines in the workplace. Jossey-Bass.
Think Different 