What is the Great Inertia?

Let’s start by looking at the narrative:

📖In Adapt, Survive and Flourish, after an afternoon of drinking with his friends, Marko, a second-year university student, notices Judy, the founder of the Tuesday Night Survivors Club, sitting next to him at the bar.

“Are you guys part of the Tuesday Night Survivors Club?”

Judy is surprised and taken aback. She smiles and looks at him. “Yes, we are.”

He laughs and explains, “The barman told me about your group and your aim to save the world from climate change—don’t you think you’re a bit late? Especially as companies like BP have just abandoned renewable energy and returned to fossil fuels.”

It was evident that Marko no longer thought the struggle to mitigate climate change was worth the effort. His mindset was clear: ‘If major global corporate BP don’t care anymore, then why should I?’

📖In Learn, Transform and Navigate, Bruno has recently joined NaturFlourish as an Enterprise Architect. Previously, he used AI to build a Business Capability Model to explain the benefits of Enterprise Architecture to the CEO, Sam. Both he and Sam were so taken with it that it was laminated as an A0 diagram on the boardroom wall, where it became a focal point for conversations about planning and change. Only after Mallory challenged its veracity did they realise their error.

Both Marko and Bruno fell into what this work describes as the Great Inertia Trap.

Marko accepted BP’s behaviour as permission to disengage. Bruno accepted superficial coherence as sufficient validation. In both cases, they followed what Robert Fritz (1989) described as the Path of Least Resistance — the tendency for individuals and organisations to drift toward the easiest psychologically comfortable response rather than confronting the deeper structural realities of the situation.

Many organisations struggle to implement change even when it appears clearly necessary.

They conduct reviews, write recommendations, launch transformation programs, and adopt new technologies. Leaders speak about innovation, adaptability, resilience, and continuous improvement. Yet despite these efforts, organisations often repeat the same behaviours, make the same decisions, and encounter the same failures.

Most people assume inertia is primarily structural. They point to legacy systems, governance, process complexity, hierarchy, regulation, or outdated technology. These factors matter. Stable structures provide continuity, coordination, and reliability. Without them, organisations cannot function effectively.

But the deeper source of inertia is often not purely structural.

It also exists within the tacit layer of organisational life — habits, routines, relationships, assumptions, identities, shared interpretations, and socially accepted ways of operating. Over time, these become deeply embedded in everyday practice, shaping not only how work is performed, but how reality itself is interpreted.

This phenomenon is described here as The Great Inertia.

The Great Inertia refers to the human tendency to preserve existing meaning, identity, coherence, and legitimacy, even when change appears necessary.

As a result, organisations often appear to change on the surface while underlying beliefs and behaviours remain largely intact. New structures may be introduced. New technologies may be implemented. Strategic language may evolve. Yet beneath the surface, familiar assumptions continue shaping decisions and actions.

This helps explain why many transformation initiatives struggle despite significant investment and genuine effort.

Organisational learning scholars such as Michael Polanyi (Polanyi, 2009) and Ikujiro Nonaka (Nonaka, 1998) argue that much organisational knowledge is tacit — embedded in lived experience, routines, relationships, and shared mental models. These tacit structures help stabilise identity and reduce uncertainty. However, the same stabilising mechanisms can also reduce adaptability.

Over time, assumptions become normalised. Interpretations become taken for granted. Imagining alternative realities becomes increasingly difficult. Organisations gradually become trapped within the boundaries of what they already believe to be true.

Importantly, this inertia is rarely malicious. People may genuinely support change while unconsciously preserving familiar assumptions and behaviours. In many cases, individuals are defending competence, identity, status, or previously successful interpretations of reality.

This introduces a significant psychological dimension to organisational inertia.

When admitting mistakes feels unsafe, learning slows. Dialogue shifts into advocacy. Reflection weakens. Dissent becomes risky. Defensive routines emerge to preserve coherence and legitimacy.

The organisation continues moving — but increasingly within the boundaries of inherited assumptions and reinforcing patterns.

This is one reason many digital transformation efforts fail. The problem is rarely technological alone. More commonly, organisations introduce new systems while preserving old assumptions. Explicit change occurs, but tacit learning does not. Existing mental models continue shaping behaviour, and organisations gradually revert toward familiar practices.

True adaptability depends on more than strategy, technology, or structural redesign. It requires the capacity to reflect, question assumptions, tolerate ambiguity, notice weak signals, and allow lived experience to challenge existing beliefs.

Without these conditions, organisational learning gradually weakens. Tacit contribution declines. Dialogue becomes performative. Learning loops narrow. Adaptive capacity deteriorates, even while organisations continue appearing active, busy, and strategically engaged.

The Great Inertia does not imply that change is impossible, nor that stability itself is undesirable. Stability supports trust, continuity, and coherent action. The challenge is that the same structures and tacit patterns that preserve coherence can also inhibit deep adaptive learning.

Adaptive organisations therefore do not eliminate inertia entirely. Instead, they develop the capacity to learn, reflect, and adapt without destroying trust or organisational identity. They create environments where assumptions can be challenged safely, weak signals can be explored seriously, and reality is allowed to reshape existing interpretations before crisis forces change upon the system.

The greatest barrier to transformation is often not technology, structure, or strategy alone.

It is the quiet tendency of human systems to preserve familiar meaning.

🔗 Also relevant to:

• Shared Mental Models
• Dialogue vs Debate
• Double-loop Learning
• Reflective Inquiry
• Psychological Safety
• Forced Certainty Too Early
• Organisational Learning Fragility
• Adaptive Capacity

 

Fritz, R. (1989). The path of least resistance: Learning to become the creative force in your own life: Ballantine Books.

Nonaka, I. (1998). The ‘ART’ of knowledge – Systems to capitalize on market knowledge. European management journal, 16(6).

Polanyi, M. (2009). The tacit dimension. In Knowledge in organisations (pp. 135-146): Routledge.