Saturday, October 10, 2026
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Dr Leandro Herrero:
Organisations live in two realities at the same time.
There is the audio: what the organisation says about itself. It comes through strategies, values, leadership programmes, town halls, intranets, presentations and increasingly polished corporate language.
And then there is the video: what you actually see people doing. Who talks to whom. Where decisions are really made. What gets rewarded. Who gets promoted. Who gets listened to. Where the money goes. What happens when the declared principles become inconvenient.
Curiously, the audio and the video are often badly synchronised.
This is not necessarily hypocrisy. That would be too easy. Most organisations genuinely believe much of their own audio. The more interesting problem is that they mistake the organisation they aspire to be for the organisation they have actually designed.
Here are some examples.
The audio says: Everybody is a leader in their own right. Leadership is distributed. Leadership happens everywhere.
The video shows: A disproportionate amount of attention, development, visibility and authority remains concentrated at the top. Information cascades down, decisions travel up for approval, and senior leaders continue to receive most of the organisational oxygen.
We have distributed the language of leadership considerably further than we have distributed its power.
The audio says: We recognise the importance of informal networks, cross-functional relationships and the connections between people.
The video shows: Daily organisational life remains overwhelmingly organised through hierarchies, reporting lines and formal channels. We may acknowledge networks in presentations (always pretty pictures guaranteed) while continuing to manage as though the organisation chart were an accurate map of how work gets done. It isn’t.
The informal organisation is frequently where trust travels, where reputations are formed, where help is found and where change either accelerates or dies. Yet it remains strangely invisible to management practice.
The audio says: Everybody has a unique role. We value individuality, talent and what each person uniquely brings to the organisation.
The video shows: Your uniqueness has an extraordinary tendency to disappear at the next reorganisation.
Your opportunities, influence and sometimes your continued employment depend enormously on where you sit, whom you report to and whether the organisational box containing you is currently considered important.
We celebrate the individual while managing the box.
The audio says: We segment customers relentlessly. We use sophisticated data and insights to understand their differences. We personalise propositions and tailor communications.
The video shows: Inside the same organisation, everybody receives remarkably similar communications, initiatives, programmes and change processes.
The marketing department would consider it absurd to treat every customer identically. Internally, however, segmentation is often rudimentary or non-existent. Twenty thousand employees? Send an email to twenty thousand employees.
We have somehow developed sophisticated theories of human difference outside the company gates and remarkably primitive ones inside them.
The audio says: Internal Communications is strategic. It deserves a seat at the table. It should help organisations navigate complexity, alignment and change.
The video shows: Internal Communications is still frequently treated as a content factory: producing campaigns, messages, videos, newsletters and materials after important decisions have already been made.
It is brought in to communicate the decision, rather than help shape the environment in which that decision will succeed or fail.
The irony is considerable. Few functions are potentially better positioned to understand how the formal and informal organisations connect. Yet many remain trapped in a mechanistic model in which communication means transmitting information.
Strategic importance cannot simply be declared. The work has to become strategic too.
The audio says: We are far better than AI. Machines cannot really think. They merely predict, imitate and pretend.
The video shows: We use AI all the time (sometimes discreetly) and occasionally discover that it “thinks” rather better than quite a few people we know. We dismiss its intelligence in public while increasingly relying on it in private.
Perhaps the most interesting question is not whether machines can think like humans. It is what happens when humans become satisfied with thinking like machines: predictable, frictionless, immediate and unwilling to stay with a difficult question for very long.
The audio/video discrepancy may be telling us something uncomfortable about ourselves, not simply about AI.
The audio says: Culture belongs to everybody. We all create culture every day. Culture is “how we do things around here”.
The video shows: When something needs to be done about culture, we give it to HR, Internal Communications, a transformation team or a “culture programme”. Culture suddenly becomes a project, a workstream, a set of communications and perhaps a new collection of values.
We say culture belongs to everybody while behaving as though somebody, somewhere, is responsible for installing it.
Culture does not reside in the programme. It resides in the repeated behaviours, relationships and social norms that continue after the programme has gone home.
The audio says: We collaborate. We break silos. We work across boundaries. We are one organisation.
The video shows: Budgets remain vertical. Targets remain vertical. Careers remain largely vertical. Performance is frequently assessed vertically. Resources are defended vertically.
Then we hold a workshop asking people why they don’t collaborate horizontally.
This one should not surprise us.
People are usually rather good at understanding what the system genuinely values. They pay considerably more attention to what gets rewarded than to what appears on the corporate wallpaper.
Turn the sound off
There are many more examples. Innovation is celebrated while failure remains dangerous. Speaking up is encouraged until somebody says something genuinely inconvenient. Agility is praised inside approval systems requiring twelve signatures.
But the point is not to compile a catalogue of corporate contradictions. The disparity between audio and video is diagnostic.
When they diverge, look underneath. Something is producing the discrepancy: incentives, hierarchy, status, habits, structures, relationships, fear, precedent, resource allocation or simply the gravitational pull of “how things have always been done”.
And here is the uncomfortable part. When the audio and the video disagree, believe the video.
Behaviour is extraordinarily revealing. Watch where attention goes. Watch who gets promoted. Watch whose calls get returned. Watch which meetings matter. Watch how quickly the hierarchy reappears when something goes wrong. Watch what happens to principles when they become expensive.
The audio tells you the organisation’s story about itself. The video tells you how the organisation actually works.
So, next time you really want to understand an organisation, try something radical.
Turn the sound off and watch the film.
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Dr Leandro Herrero is Chief Organizational Architect at The Chalfont Project, psychiatrist, author, and international speaker. For over 25 years, he and his team have transformed organizational cultures worldwide through his pioneering Viral Change™ methodology – where a social movement approach creates lasting change. Follow Dr Herrero on LinkedIn for his latest updates.
Coming soon – The first ever Viral Change™ Practitioner Licencing Programme. Launching soon for the first cohort of licensees, follow updated on LinkedIn and at www.leandroherreroinstitute.com
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