I see plenty of org charts, process maps, and culture decks that try to explain how a business really works.
Yes and...pressure often does a significantly better job.
When things get tense, the hidden rules show themselves:
who actually decides; what gets protected; what quietly gets dropped.
Like people, organisations revert to type when they are stressed.
And the behaviours you see in those moments are not a breakdown of the system. They are the system.
In innovation, crisis and creativity are often treated as mutually exclusive.
They are not. Creativity is about ideas. Innovation is about what the system will allow to survive and thrive.
That is why deliberately introducing a bit of “crisis thinking” into the innovation process can be so useful.
A burning platform thought experiment, for example.
It quickly shows you how your innovation setup really behaves.
And crucially, what would need to change for it to behave differently next time.