We all want to be the good guys. I’ve never met a person who genuinely thinks they’re the villain in their own story, not in organizational politics, not in international affairs, not anywhere.
That instinct is mostly harmless. Where it becomes dangerous is when powerful states weaponize it as policy.
The regime change fallacy
For decades the tool has been the same: remove the bad actor, install something friendlier, let stability follow. The logic is clean on paper, and the intentions are often genuinely held.
But history doesn’t support the clean version. Unintended consequences surface years later, sometimes catastrophically, and the underlying system that produced the original problem remains untouched.
Good intentions, examined too shallowly, produce consequences nobody intended and everybody suffers. That gap between intention and action is the thing we consistently fail to examine.
The anthropomorphic fallacy
There’s a second pattern operating underneath the first.
The Anthropomorphic Fallacy is the tendency to project human characteristics onto non-human entities. In geopolitics, this means demonising an entire population for the behaviour of its leadership. Label the government evil and the label migrates to the people. Once that migration happens, almost any action against them becomes justifiable.
It’s neither logical nor evidentially true. But it bypasses analysis and activates emotion, which is precisely why it keeps working.
Why we let it happen
The root condition is this: we’ve stopped thinking independently.
We consume what confirms our existing beliefs, defer to whoever sits at the top of our particular tribe, and treat speed of consumption as a substitute for understanding. Ideological certainty fills the space where evidence used to sit.
I watched this pattern in platform teams and government agencies for years, the same structure at every scale. The system drifts, leadership doubles down on the original diagnosis, the people closest to the problem say nothing because the tribe has spoken. It moves from a 50-person engineering team to a superpower without changing shape.
What I think
I don’t have a prescription, and I’m genuinely uncertain whether the drift reverses at the collective level.
But individually, the path is clear enough. Ask why, more than once, until you reach the root. Seek the perspective that contradicts yours, especially when it’s uncomfortable. Demand evidence that challenges your current position, not just evidence that supports it.
We outsourced our thinking in the name of speed and productivity. The cost of that is playing out right now.
I guess the real question is whether enough people think the cost has finally gotten too high.
For the past 2 years, I’ve been tracking New Zealand’s unemployment rate using 3-quarter and 8-quarter moving averages. Nothing sophisticated, just adding the last few quarters together to smooth out the noise and watch the direction of travel over time.
I started doing this because headlines tend to swing emotionally from quarter to quarter, optimism one month, panic the next, while labour markets usually move much slower than people realise.
The March 2026 unemployment rate came in at 5.3%.
From my observation, the situation hasn’t changed very much. The curve has flattened slightly, but the broader trend still looks like a slow unwind rather than a recovery.
And I think many people can already feel this without looking at the charts.
You see it in the number of applicants chasing a single role. You hear it in conversations around restructures, delayed hiring, shrinking budgets, and experienced people applying for jobs well below where they were 2 years ago. Even recruiters, who were once overwhelmed by shortages, now sound more cautious.
This cycle feels different because it never arrived like a crisis.
No dramatic collapse. No single shock event. Just a long gradual tightening.
Those are often the harder cycles to navigate because people keep waiting for things to “go back to normal”, while the system underneath has already changed.
New Zealand is also tied closely to what happens elsewhere. We are a small open economy, whether we like it or not, and the broader Western economies have all been wrestling with similar pressures: weaker growth, high living costs, cautious investment, geopolitical tension, and businesses delaying decisions longer than usual.
The patterns rhyme.
One thing I’ve noticed is that activity can return before confidence does. Job ads might increase, projects restart, conversations pick up again, but employers still hesitate at the final step. Hiring becomes selective. Expansion gets delayed. Permanent roles quietly become contracts. Everyone waits for someone else to move first.
That creates a strange disconnect where the data says conditions are “improving”, while lived experience still feels tight.
Both are true.
I also think remote work changed the labour market more than many expected. A role that once attracted applicants from one city now attracts applicants from everywhere. Geography matters differently now. Competition widened quietly while most people were still arguing about working from home policies.
And underneath all this sits a bigger structural question.
What does stable employment even look like going forward?
I’m not sure the old assumptions fully hold anymore, especially for younger workers entering the market now. Career ladders look less linear, tenure matters less than adaptability, and many people are stitching together portfolio careers, contract work, side income, and remote opportunities across borders.
The system is changing while people are still using the old mental models to interpret it.
So personally, I’ve spent less time trying to predict the exact turning point and more time thinking about resilience, cashflow, adaptability, health, keeping skills current, maintaining relationships, and staying mentally steady while the cycle runs its course.
Economic cycles come and go. They always have.
But slow cycles test people differently. They wear people down gradually because the signals stay mixed for a long time.
I guess that’s what I’ve been observing these past 2 years.
Not collapse. Not recovery either.
Just a long adjustment phase that still hasn’t fully played out.
A leader walks into a town hall and tells the room they want everyone learning Python, that upskilling is the future, the department is going all-in on capability. Someone raises their hand. “Can we get training funding?” Leadership checks the budget. Two seats approved, 150 people waiting.
That’s the friction. And that friction, repeated across enough decisions, is what culture actually is.
Most leaders don’t see it that way. When people complain about culture, they reach for the hygiene factors: more communication, better coffee, birthday celebrations, quarterly get-togethers. These matter, but they’re not what I mean by culture. Culture is a set of behaviours, how people come together around a common goal, and whether leadership means what it says. You can have excellent coffee and a toxic culture. I’ve seen it.
The mistake most organisations make is treating culture as a programme, something with milestones and colourful slide decks. Programmes feel controllable. Culture isn’t controllable. It moves through repeated human behaviour, leadership signals, budget decisions, and the distance between what leaders promise and what the system actually allows.
When leadership closes that gap, behaviour changes. When they don’t, you get lip service with a fancy name.
The diagnosis
In 2017, I was leading Strategy, Planning and Performance in Digital Business Services at Stats New Zealand, about 150 people across the digital technology division. Everyone was blaming culture for why teams didn’t cooperate, why management behaved one way and staff another. Culture became the explanation for every symptom, which meant nobody was actually diagnosing it.
So I found a model people could understand quickly. William Schneider’s culture model maps organisational behaviour across four quadrants: Control, Cultivation, Collaboration, and Competence. Simple enough for a frontline staff member to read, specific enough to point at real behaviour.
We ran a survey across the whole department. The result was clear: a dominant Control culture, with a secondary Cultivation culture sitting beside it. Those two sit directly opposite each other on the model. According to Schneider, opposite cultures are in conflict.
That Python training moment is what that conflict looks like in practice. Leadership says “develop yourself, grow, we want you to be excellent,” which is Cultivation talking. The budget says “sorry, two seats,” which is Control answering. Staff hears both. They weigh both. What they believe is the one that has money behind it.
Multiply that across every approval chain and governance decision, and you get a department where people have learned not to expect much.
I still remember one town hall where we asked staff openly what was getting in the way. The room went quiet. Then someone said, carefully: “customer comes first.” Everyone nodded. What they actually meant was that other business units came first, and the technology teams absorbed the pressure downstream. The phrase sounded principled on paper. In practice, people experienced it as cover for decisions that had already been made above them. That one moment of careful language told me more than any survey could.
Making the gap visible
The standard approach is an annual engagement survey. Stats New Zealand, as a government department, already ran one. The number comes back, the CEO says things are improving, and nothing changes until the same survey runs twelve months later. You can’t navigate with a map you only look at once a year.
We used NPS instead, adapted for employee experience. Every month, one anonymous question: “How likely would you be to recommend DBS to a qualified friend or family member as a great place to work?” Score from 0 to 10.
The key was converting the quantitative scale into something qualitative. We presented it to staff as a smiley face scale, each range corresponding to a feeling: 0 to 6 is disengaged or passive, 7 and 8 is indifferent, 9 and 10 is genuinely positive. The scale is deliberately skewed. You have to be certain of what you’re feeling to hit a 9 or 10. Passivity doesn’t count as engagement.
We published the results on Yammer within a week of every month-end. All staff. The bad months too.
That last part matters more than people assume. Most cultural programmes fail because staff have already survived several of them, and they know the pattern: leaders announce the initiative, run some workshops, measure activity, declare victory, and move on. By the time the next programme starts, the scepticism is already baked in.
Publishing results openly, including comments, including the months where the score dropped, was the signal that something different was happening. Nothing to hide. If something was broken, it was visible to everyone, which meant it was everyone’s responsibility, not just a topic for the next leadership offsite.
We had three central line uplifts between April 2018 and February 2021: from -4% to 11%, then to 18%, then to 37.4%. Each uplift represented a new statistical baseline, the average exceeding the previous ceiling long enough to set a new floor.
What changed behaviour at each stage was simpler than any programme document would suggest. People watched leaders respond to the comments, not just the number. They saw the data used to hold leadership accountable as much as staff. I would take the results back to my fellow leaders and reflect it at them directly: here are which teams are struggling, everyone can see it, so what are we going to do? That creates a particular kind of pressure among leaders, the kind where difficult conversations start happening before they become crises.
On the staff side, I watched behaviour start shifting toward the left side of the Schneider model. People began working out loud, owning their own paths, asking questions they’d stopped asking. The environment changed because the trust changed. Those two things move together, and you can’t manufacture one without the other.
What failed, and why it matters
One team read Holacracy, came to senior leadership, and we said yes, let’s try it.
The idea has genuine merit: self-organising teams, distributed authority, people able to act without waiting for approval. It works somewhere. It didn’t work here.
The problem was financial delegation. In a government department, spending authority is tied to your role. You can’t extend it informally, and we checked. HR confirmed: 150 team members cannot have financial signing authority, even at $100. Someone is accountable for the budget, and that accountability is structural. The model couldn’t survive that constraint.
We told the team plainly: this doesn’t work in a government context, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise.
Worth noting, though. The experiment taught us where the walls were, and that’s real information. Management models designed for startups with flat structures and discretionary spending don’t migrate cleanly into organisations with legislative obligations and financial controls. You can want a different culture and still operate inside a system that limits how far certain ideas can travel. Knowing that boundary saved us from chasing the model instead of the behaviour it was trying to produce.
The Covid test
Before 2020, DBS had been running flexible working quietly for a while. Two days from home, compressed hours, alternate Fridays off for some people. The Chief Digital Officer believed the trust was there, and high trust means people can work from wherever they’re most effective. We were already on Microsoft Teams when most of the organisation had barely heard of it.
Other business units were unimpressed. I heard “recalcitrant” more than once. We were the department that asked too many questions, didn’t follow the standard IT playbook, apparently needed managing.
Then Covid arrived.
The CEO was under pressure. Most of the organisation had no remote capability, no tested platforms, no experience running a distributed team. We had been doing it for two years. We helped onboard the rest of the organisation onto Teams, ran the virtual meeting training, and kept delivering without interruption.
That wasn’t luck. The trust built over three years and the investment in tools people called unnecessary right up until the day they were essential: both paid off in a week that most organisations remember as a crisis they barely survived. Our critics went quiet. There’s not much to say when a department you called recalcitrant already knows how to do the thing you’re scrambling to figure out.
What the numbers confirmed
The Schneider survey in December 2020 confirmed what we had felt for months. The organisation had moved left on the model, toward Collaboration, away from the Control-Cultivation tension that had caused the original friction in 2017.
The NPS score that had started at -14% sat at 50% by February 2021.
The DBS 2.0 Programme formally ended. The culture didn’t. It kept going because enough people had experienced what it felt like when leadership actually closed the gap between what it said and what it did. That experience is what people carry forward, not the programme name or the slide deck.
Culture drifts toward entropy when leadership stops paying attention. The work is keeping better behaviour alive long enough for people to believe it’s real.
I was walking through Universal Studios Singapore when a poster stopped me.
Three Minions, fists raised, smiling like they had just unionised against common sense.
“Join us. Free bananas for life.”
The poster promised excitement, training, developmint, and fun. Yes, spelled that way. I stood there laughing for a while because, whether you like it or not, most organisations eventually produce their own version of this poster. Different branding, better spelling, more polished photography, same underlying proposition.
Join us. The bananas are free.
It sounds ridiculous when Minions say it. Less ridiculous when corporations do.
The thing about perks, culture, and “fun” workplaces is that they only exist while the economics underneath remain healthy. Once the system starts wobbling, the free coffee disappears, the learning budget gets frozen, the Friday drinks quietly stop, and suddenly everyone discovers the “family culture” was actually a cost centre with balloons.
I’ve seen this pattern enough times across banking, government, and education sectors to know the sequence is surprisingly predictable. Revenue pressure arrives first, leadership starts using softer language to describe harder realities, restructuring rumours begin floating around corridors like cigarette smoke in an old casino, then everyone acts surprised when the layoffs finally happen.
The signals were already there.
But here’s what I got wrong about the Minions the first time I saw that poster.
I assumed they were fragile because they seemed so indiscriminately loyal. Gru, then Vector, then whoever shows up with a plan and a lair. They flip-flop so fast that the obvious read is instability. Actually the opposite is true. The Minions survive precisely because they’re not attached to any particular boss. They carry their capabilities with them. They adapt quickly, rebuild under whoever the new leader is, and keep doing what they’ve always done: improvising, constructing things, breaking them accidentally, recovering. Their culture doesn’t live inside Gru’s lair. It travels with them.
I’ve watched something similar play out in organisations, and it’s more instructive than it first appears.
When I joined National Bank of New Zealand, the bank had its own distinct feel. Lloyd’s Bank in the UK was the parent company, but the place felt genuinely New Zealand throughout, in the customer service, the premises, the way people operated day to day. Then ANZ purchased it from Lloyd’s. Two cultures formed immediately, National Bank people and ANZ people, Kiwi versus Australian, and there was quiet friction about which way the merged entity would settle. The conventional expectation in any acquisition is that the larger institution absorbs the smaller one. ANZ had the capital, ANZ had the scale, ANZ held the cards.
A few years in, ANZ adopted National Bank’s culture and processes, at least in New Zealand. The combined entity was rebranded ANZ National Bank, and when the “National” eventually got dropped, the National Bank way of operating had already absorbed much of the new structure. What tipped it wasn’t sentiment. During the integration, when branch premises were rationalised, the National Bank locations were consistently preferred over the ANZ branches next door, even though they had been direct competitors. National Bank had ranked higher in customer service surveys among New Zealand banks for years. The culture had something real underneath it, and that’s why it outlasted the acquisition.
Strong culture shows up in the survey results. The poster is decoration.
BNZ had a similar internal split. The traditional IT department sat alongside BNZ Digital, which ran at a different pace, with different tools and a different sense of urgency. Two technology camps inside the same institution. Eventually the digital culture expanded into the broader technology function, and what tipped it was the same thing: the digital team was delivering. Mobile and desktop banking services were moving. The other side was not moving at the same rate. Cultures that produce results tend to absorb the ones that don’t, whether or not the org chart has caught up yet.
Inland Revenue is where this became personal.
I introduced the Toyota Production System there, quality control circles, metrics on the wall, team huddles running across the supply chain process, working out loud. A senior manager came to me directly. “Hey Wayne, we don’t do Agile here in Inland Revenue.” I said I was doing TPS, not Agile, which didn’t land the way I intended. A couple of years later that same manager was pursuing her MBA and carrying Mary Poppendieck’s book on Lean Software Development. She had converted. The person who told me not to implement Agile became its advocate, without ever quite connecting it back to what had already been running in our team. The irony was manageable. Production priority one incidents dropped while I was there. The method proved itself, and methods that actually work tend to win eventually, even if the timeline is annoying.
Many people described me as a job hopper over those years because I moved from one organisation to another every couple of years. I understand why it reads that way from the outside. The honest explanation is that I carried a specific set of capabilities into different environments to solve particular problems, and once the problem was either solved or stuck, the case for staying weakened. This is the Minion model, whether I intended it that way or not. You accumulate skills, deploy them wherever you land, and you don’t require the organisation to validate them for you. The skills travel. The org chart doesn’t.
Most people bind their professional identity too tightly to the employer’s brand. When that brand disappears in an acquisition or a restructure, they lose the thread of who they are professionally. The Minions never had that problem. They were always themselves, regardless of who was holding the freeze ray.
Back at ANZ in technology, we had adopted the startup culture trappings: drinks on Friday afternoon, biscuits, coffee available throughout the day, the general ease of a place where people felt comfortable. It felt good. Then the Global Financial Crisis arrived and the budget tightened fast. The Friday drinks stopped. The biscuits stopped. The sense of shared ease got quieter without anyone announcing it.
Same at BNZ Digital later. Things were good while they were good. Then they weren’t. The drinks dried up.
Nothing in an organisation is actually free. The bananas are always funded from somewhere, and when that somewhere tightens, the bananas are among the first things to go. Organisations that use perks as the primary signal of culture have nothing underneath when the perks disappear. The ones that survive downturns are the ones where the culture exists in how people work, not in what they’re served on a Friday afternoon.
I guess the deeper point is this: before accepting the bananas, spend some time understanding who is paying for them, how sustainable the system is, and what happens when conditions change. Every business cycle eventually turns. Every organisation enters a different season. Strong cultures survive because the fundamentals underneath them are real, and people who survive transitions are the ones who built something portable, not the ones who waited for the lair to stay stable.
The Minions will probably be fine. Kevin will become a motivational speaker somehow, Stuart will join a terrible garage band, and Bob will accidentally build a successful kombucha startup without understanding basic accounting.
