THE ILLUSION OF ORGANIZATIONAL LIFE: WHEN CULTURE KILLS TO MAINTAIN THE APPEARANCE OF LIFE

What we’ve done with radical otherness in intimate relationships can — and must — be transposed onto the organizational fabric. Because the silent murder of otherness that you perpetrate at home, you also practice at work. Except there it happens on a systemic scale, institutionalized, masked by sophisticated discourses of “high-performance culture,” “strategic alignment,” and “positive organizational climate.”
If you managed to endure the discomfort of the text I wrote titled “Stop Trying to Be God in the Life of Those You Claim to Love” — published on my blog — the one about how you turn those you love into objects, into domesticated extensions of your needs — brace yourself. Because now we’re going to examine how entire organizations operate the exact same violence, only with million-dollar budgets, advanced technological tools, and the blessing of the board of directors.
In contemporary organizations — especially in 2026, with the obsessive hyper-measurement of interactions via behavioral monitoring tools, OKRs that invade even lunch breaks, 360° feedback turned into permanent surveillance, and engagement algorithms that know more about your emotional state than you do — the Other has disappeared. The employee, the subordinate, the peer, the internal client: all have been reduced to the Same. To the KPI. To the mapped and cataloged behavioral profile. To the engagement score. To the pre-defined “cultural fit” even before you enter the company.
Otherness is tolerated only to the exact extent that it serves the organizational totality. When it erupts — an unexpected burnout that wasn’t flagged by the people analytics system, a resignation without the “early indicators” the algorithm was supposed to detect, an ethical refusal of a directive everyone else accepted without question, a diversity expression that misaligns the sacred “company values” — the reaction is not ethical hospitality of radical otherness. It’s diagnosis. Corrective action plan. Coaching for realignment. Another attempt at capture.
Watch the operation: someone dares to be Other, dares to escape the map the organization built over them, and immediately the system enters containment mode.
“Let’s understand what’s going on” — translation: let’s map this uncomfortable otherness to neutralize it.
“Let’s offer support” — translation: let’s bring them back into the categories we control.
“Let’s work on cultural fit” — translation: let’s make you disappear as Other and be reborn as Same.
And when capture fails? When the person insists on remaining radically Other? Exit interview. Termination due to “lack of alignment”. Strategic restructuring. The organization prefers to lose the person than to sustain the ethical tension of living with someone who doesn’t fit the map.
Think of that brilliant candidate who went through seven interview rounds, impressed everyone, had the perfect résumé. But in the end, HR decided: “Not a cultural fit.” Brutal translation: they’re too good, but too Other. They scare us. We can’t predict how they’ll behave. We’d rather have someone less competent, as long as they fit perfectly into our control categories.
Or that other case: an employee with 95% engagement in the last survey, participating in all projects, seemingly happy. Suddenly, a resignation. Leadership in shock: “But they were doing so well! We don’t understand what happened!”
Yeah, you don’t. Because they had been systematically neutralized for months, answered what was expected in the questionnaire — having learned that otherness is not tolerated — and finally managed to escape. And now you conduct the exit interview not to listen to them, but to map the otherness that escaped, ensuring you capture the next ones better.

ORGANIZATIONS THAT SEEM ALIVE BUT ARE ALREADY DEAD
Here lies the brutal parallel with what we examined in personal relationships: organizational culture, when it becomes a project of totalization, kills radical otherness. And with it dies the possibility of genuine organizational life. What remains is an operation of appearance maintenance: leaders and HR trying to artificially keep a symbolic organism alive through climate surveys, wellbeing programs, empathy training, mandatory happy hours.
All of this operating on structures of subjectivities that have been mapped, categorized, and neutralized. You’re not managing living people. You’re managing simulacra. Projections you yourself created and now try to keep presentable.
Observe the company that offers a robust wellbeing program: guided meditation, office yoga, organic fruit, decompression rooms. Meanwhile, it still demands 24/7 availability, impossible targets everyone knows are unattainable, 8 p.m. meetings because “the market never stops,” a culture of weekend messages. The operation is clear: let’s manage the symptom without touching the cause. We want you functional, not alive. We want you productive within burnout, not free from burnout.
Or the company that prides itself on an “open feedback culture.” A courageous employee gives honest feedback about a dysfunctional process that’s destroying the team. Two months later, they’re mysteriously “off the radar” for promotions. Six months later, “termination due to restructuring.” Open feedback meant: agree with us openly. The otherness that dares to contradict, that dares to point out what doesn’t work, that dares to be radically Other in relation to the official discourse — that is not tolerated, no matter how many “transparency” values are framed on the wall.
The living organizational culture is dead. What you have is a body being artificially kept alive. And you know it’s dead because there’s no more wonder. No more surprise. Everything is predictable. All meetings have the same format. All decisions follow the same script. All employees are “aligned” — translation: all have been sufficiently neutralized to no longer be a nuisance.
And when collective burnout emerges, when innovation disappears, when the most talented people resign one after another, the organization doesn’t examine whether it killed otherness. It hires a consultancy to run a climate diagnosis, to map “root causes,” to create an “action plan” — another layer of control, another attempt at capture, another refusal to sustain the ethical tension of standing before Others who will never be fully understandable.

THE TENSIONS THIS TEXT DOES NOT RESOLVE — BECAUSE YOU NEED TO RESOLVE THEM
Here we arrive at the crucial point that no management manual admits: there are tensions that have no definitive resolution. Only permanent sustenance. And each organization, each culture, each moment demands its own way of inhabiting them.
This text will not offer “the solution.” It will present the tensions, show some exits that others have experimented with, and summon you to build your own. Because everything in life is singular. Your organization is not another. Your culture is not generic. Your moment is not universal.

TENSION 1: Necessary Coordination vs. Capture of Autonomy
The situation:
A software development team needs to deliver a critical system for a hospital in 72 hours — delay could mean lives at risk. The tech lead establishes: mandatory daily alignment meetings, pair programming for sensitive code, deployment only after triple code review. A senior developer with 15 years of experience feels suffocated:
“You’re treating me like a junior. Don’t you trust me? I’ve always worked with full autonomy and never failed.”
The leader insists on the processes. The developer resigns a week later, citing “excessive control” as the reason.
Possible exits that some organizations have experimented with:
(None of these are prescriptions. They are only directions others have tried.)
Radical transparency about temporality:
“These protocols exist only during this critical 72-hour window because the risk is human life. Once this is over, we collectively decide which processes to keep and which to eliminate. Are you willing to sustain this tension for 3 days?”
Standards with explicit expiration dates:
“This checklist is valid for 30 days. On day 31, those who lived under it meet and decide: do we renew it, radically adjust it, or kill it? Nothing is permanent here.”
Differentiation of contexts with negotiable boundaries:
“Proposal: in hospital production deployment, checklist is non-negotiable. In testing and experimentation environments, total autonomy. Do you agree with this boundary, or does it also need to be negotiated?”
Rotation of who sets the standards:
“Next month, someone else on the team defines the critical processes. This way no one crystallizes as the ‘permanent controller’.”
Questions for your singular reality:
In your organization, when a standard is born, does it have visible justification and defined temporality — or does it become an unquestionable tradition no one remembers why exists?
Who decides when a standard is created? Always the same person/role? And who decides when it dies — or are processes in your company immortal?
Is there operational difference between “life-safety standard” and “managerial control standard” — or has everything turned into an indistinct mass called “our processes”?
Can you point to 3 standards your area created in the last year and then killed because they stopped making sense? If not, what does that reveal?
Your singular construction:
Your organization is not the example. Your culture is not hospital. Your moment is not a 72-hour crisis. The exits above may not serve you — and that’s okay. Copying solutions is another form of capture.
What matters is not having “the right answer.” It’s that you stop now, look at your specific reality, and ask:
Where am I establishing standards? Why? In service of what? Who else, besides me, should be deciding this? And are these standards protecting life — or my control over the unpredictable?
There is no universal answer. There is only your answer, for your context, in this moment. And it will be provisional. Like everything that is alive.

TENSION 2: Sustaining Opacity vs. Urgent Decisions
The situation:
A healthtech startup has 48 hours to decide: radically pivot the product or maintain the current thesis and seek new investors. The decision determines survival over the next 6 months. The team is split: 8 people want to keep the product and chase other capital sources, 7 want to pivot immediately to a recurring revenue model.
The founder, who prides herself on “practicing horizontal leadership and respecting all voices,” spends 36 hours facilitating discussions, sustaining the tension, refusing to decide unilaterally. At the end of the 48 hours, there is no consensus. The decision window is lost. Three weeks later, she lays off 5 people due to lack of runway.
Possible exits that some organizations have experimented with:
Differentiation between reversible and irreversible decisions:
“Reversible decisions (we can go back): we make collectively, with time. Irreversible decisions with deadlines (this one): someone decides, and then we radically account for why.”
Rotation of decision-making responsibility:
“Strategic decisions type A: founder decides. Type B: CTO decides. Type C: product decides. No one centralizes everything, but each type has someone responsible who doesn’t paralyze.”
Pre-agreed emergency protocol:
“When we have less than 72h to decide something critical, we trigger protocol X: one person decides, others know they’ll disagree, and we accept this as the cost of urgency. But mandatory debriefing afterward.”
Consultative, not consensus:
“Whoever decides listens to everyone (mandatory), but doesn’t need unanimous agreement to act. Later, explains why they decided against some opinions.”
Questions for your singular reality:
How many decisions in your organization are currently paralyzed because someone is “sustaining tension” — and how many of these are ethical sustenance vs. fear of responsibility?
When you avoid deciding, is it because you’re respecting the Other’s opacity — or because you’re afraid of being wrong and held accountable?
Does your culture differentiate types of decisions (reversible/irreversible, urgent/structural) or treat everything with the same process?
Has “respecting all voices” ever resulted in no one acting and the problem worsening? How do you internally name that?
Your singular construction:
The startup in the example is not yours. Your deadline is not 48h. Your decision is not about pivoting. But the tension is the same: how to honor otherness without paralyzing action?
There is no answer that always works. There is only your ability to distinguish “I am sustaining ethical tension” from “I am fleeing responsibility” — and only you, looking honestly at your specific case, can make that distinction.
Maybe in your organization, at this moment, ethics demands that you decide alone and then submit yourself to collective judgment. Maybe it demands that you wait longer. I don’t know. You need to know. And own it.

TENSION 3: Symmetrical Encounter vs. Power Asymmetry
The situation:
An operations manager in a 360° evaluation process tells his team of 6 analysts:
“I need you to be radically honest with me about my leadership. No fear. I want to sustain your otherness, even when it hurts. You can say anything.”
A junior analyst thinks:
“He’s controlling, micromanages everything, doesn’t truly delegate, and has created a climate of fear. But if I say this, I’ll be marked. He decides my bonus, my promotion, my project allocation. There’s no ‘without fear’ here.”
Result: everyone gives generic, positive feedback. The manager feels validated. Three months later, two analysts resign citing “lack of autonomy” — the manager is shocked because “no one ever complained.”
Possible exits that some organizations have experimented with:
360° evaluation with external facilitation and real anonymity:
“Leadership feedback doesn’t go directly to the leader. It goes to HR/consultancy who compiles, truly anonymizes it, and then discusses it with the leader without exposing who said what.”
Rotation of decision-making power over evaluation:
“Your performance as a leader is not evaluated only by you and your boss. It’s evaluated by the team in a format that actually impacts your progression — it’s not cosmetic.”
Structurally protected spaces:
“Monthly meeting only for the team, without the leader, with an HR representative who takes anonymized issues upward. Not perfect, but creates a channel that doesn’t pass through direct power.”
Honesty about the asymmetry:
“I know there’s a power difference here. I won’t pretend we’re all equal. So I’m creating X, Y, Z to try to mitigate — but if you think it doesn’t work, tell me. Through channels that don’t involve me directly.”
Questions for your singular reality:
If you have hierarchical power: when you ask for “honest feedback,” are you creating a genuinely safe space — or putting people in an impossible situation where they must perform honesty without consequence?
If you don’t have power: when you perform agreement with someone who can fire you, are you being strategic/surviving — or are you symbolically dying? Where is the line?
In your organization, does “open feedback culture” mean that the powerful receive real criticism — or that everyone has learned to say what’s expected?
Last time someone harshly criticized the powerful: what happened to that person afterward? Promotion? Stagnation? “Voluntary” exit?
Your singular construction:
The power situation in your organization is not the example. Your hierarchy has other layers. Your mechanisms are different. But the asymmetry is there.
And here there is no clean solution. “Infinite responsibility before the Other” works differently when you can fire the Other. Ethical summons becomes manipulation when there’s power behind it.
So what do you do? I don’t know. But I know that pretending the asymmetry doesn’t exist — calling everything “horizontal partnership” — is a lie that kills.
Maybe it’s more ethical to admit:
“I have power over you. This contaminates any conversation. Let’s create imperfect structures to try to mitigate.”
Imperfect and honest is worth more than symmetrical and false.

TENSION 4: Predictability = Death vs. Critical Safety Contexts
The situation:
A public hospital, neonatal ICU. A nurse with 20 years of experience develops over time a kind of “intuitive protocol” of her own to assess critically ill premature babies, systematically deviating from the institution’s standard checklist.
She argues: “Every baby is unique, the protocol is too generic, my intuition saved lives the checklist would have lost.” And indeed: on three occasions, her “off-protocol” decisions saved newborns.
On the fourth occasion, trusting her intuition, she deviates from the checklist — and loses a baby that the standard protocol would have saved. The hospital audit removes her for “systematic violation of safety procedures.”
Possible exits that some organizations have experimented with:
Protocols with documented exceptionality clause:
“You can deviate from the standard if: (1) you document in real time why you’re deviating, (2) you alert the immediate supervisor, (3) after the case, you participate in a debriefing on whether the deviation should become a new standard.”
Collective protocol review with those who execute them:
“Every 6 months, the team that uses the checklist meets to review: what should be rigid standard? What should be flexible guidance? Those who execute, decide.”
Differentiation between protective vs. controlling standardization:
“Physical safety protocols (medication dosage): total rigidity. Approach/communication protocols: professional autonomy. Where do we draw the line? Let’s decide together.”
Learning culture without punishment (when there was no negligence):
“She deviated from the protocol and it went wrong. It wasn’t negligence, it was professional judgment that failed. This becomes a case study, not a dismissal.”
Questions for your singular reality:
In your area of work, where is unpredictability/creativity/deviation liberating and value-generating — and where would it be catastrophic and put lives/safety at risk?
Can you clearly differentiate “protocol that saves lives” from “protocol that neutralizes professional competence” — or have you generalized everything in one direction?
When someone deviates from a standard in your organization and it works: do you celebrate and review the standard? When they deviate and it fails: is there room to learn or only to punish?
Who created the protocols you follow today — were they on the front line executing — or in a distant meeting room?
Your singular construction:
Your context is not a neonatal ICU. Your risk is not babies’ lives. But the tension exists: where do you need predictability to protect — and where is predictability killing competence?
There is no generic answer. A factory of oncology drugs needs absolute rigidity in certain points. An innovation consultancy dies if it over-standardizes. And most organizations are in the middle: they need both, in different places.
So your task is not to choose “everything predictable” or “everything unpredictable.” It is to map, in your specific reality: where does each apply? Who decides? How often do we review? And are we willing to err while we learn to distinguish?

LIVING CULTURE vs. NEUTRALIZED CULTURE: WHAT NO ONE WANTS TO ADMIT
Let us now return to the central diagnosis, but with the awareness that the tensions above do not disappear. They intensify.
A living organizational culture is not one that has resolved these tensions. It is one that has accepted to inhabit them permanently, without guarantees, without definitive maps, trembling.
A dead culture is one that has achieved “total predictability” and “low ambiguity” through the systematic murder of otherness. Everyone aligned. Everyone in the same processes. No one surprising anymore. Efficient. Measurable. Dead.
A living culture is one that has learned to live with the unbearable opacity of the collective Other — entire teams that will never let themselves be fully captured, generations with irreconcilable values, real diversities that don’t fit into “inclusion programs,” professionals who challenge protocols because they saw something the protocol didn’t foresee — and transforms this permanent tension into a source of renewal, instead of a threat to be managed.
This is no longer “people management.” It is management of infinite responsibility before the organizational face of the Other. And this is where leadership stops being inspirational technique — that leader who “motivates” teams through rehearsed speeches and gamified metrics — and becomes ethical summons.
The summons is this: radical renunciation of total control over the organizational narrative. Accepting that the company will remain partially opaque to itself. That there will always be zones of unpredictability that no people analytics will capture. That people will continue to surprise, contradict, escape categories. And that it is precisely in this incompleteness — in this impossibility of total capture — that the possibility of truly human existence at work resides.
The manager who boasts:
“I know every person on my team, I know exactly how each one works, I can predict how they’ll react in every situation” — that manager doesn’t know anyone. He has replaced living people with operational models in his mental map. And when someone on the team goes through a personal crisis, reacts unexpectedly, completely breaks the script — he gets irritated, frustrated.
“That’s not typical of them. They changed. They lost focus.”
No. The person is still themselves — radically Other, even to themselves. You had captured them in your mental map. And they dared to be human. Dared to no longer fit your comfortable projection.
The organization that invests millions in diversity and inclusion programs, hires specialized consultancies, holds monthly trainings — and still promotes the same demographic and behavioral profile to the C-level. Diversity remains concentrated at the base of the pyramid, where it “adds value” and “brings fresh perspectives,” as long as it never makes strategic decisions.
That organization is not including otherness. It is managing the appearance of inclusion while keeping the Same in control at the top. Diversity is tolerated as long as it doesn’t threaten the narrative, doesn’t destabilize the premises, as long as it’s domesticable.
And then you wonder why the company is stagnant. Why there’s no real innovation, only cosmetic recombination of what already exists. Why everything has become mechanical process, bureaucracy without soul, administrative protocol no one questions anymore.
Because you killed otherness. Systematically. With sophisticated HR tools. With robust budget approved by the board. With the best intentions of “creating a strong culture.”
Without otherness, there is no genuine creativity — only recombination of the already known, repackaged as innovation. No wonder — only performative repetition of the expected. No real encounter between people — only functional transactions between simulacra you yourself built and now manage.
Organizational mental health — individual and collective — begins when you stop trying to capture completely. When you renounce the fantasy of absolute control promised by all management systems. When you accept that you will always be before walking mysteries carrying entire universes you will never fully dominate. And that this is not a failure of your management system — it is the very condition for organizational life to exist.
The joy of work — the kind not performed at mandatory happy hours or manufactured in climate surveys — does not come from successful capture. It comes from real encounter. And organizational encounter is only possible when there is space for radical Others, irreducible to one another, to accept the ethical responsibility of sustaining coexistence without guarantees, without complete maps, without total control.
You want authentic organizational culture? Then you must accept the radical otherness of the company itself. Recognize that the organization is also partially opaque to itself. That it too escapes the categories it tries to impose on itself through framed mission-vision-values. That it too is Other — even to its founder, its leader, those who have worked there for decades.
And here lies the possibility of organizational liberation. When you stop performing “perfect culture” to be admired in “best places to work” rankings. When you renounce the impossible project of becoming fully transparent, fully predictable, fully controllable — not to shareholders, not to the market, not even to yourself.
What emerges from this is not operational chaos. It is not empty strategic relativism where anything goes. It is the possibility of truly alive organizations. Of structures that breathe. Of cultures that do not exhaust themselves in the comfortable familiarity of processes established years ago. Because there will always be something more. Always resurgent otherness. Always the wonder of standing before people who will never be fully yours — and who, precisely because of that, can be partners in genuine construction.

WHAT REMAINS — FOR YOU TO ANSWER
This text offers no implementation manual. It cannot. Because each organization carries its own tensions, its own Others, its own impossibilities that do not fit into generic frameworks.
What remains are questions. Yours. Singular. Untransferable.
Look at your organization now:
How many areas are genuinely alive — surprising, destabilizing, forcing revision of premises? And how many are structures you artificially keep alive through sophisticated controls, reassuring metrics, engagement programs that manage symptoms?
How many times today did you actually see the people you work with — in their radical opacity, in their irreducibility to any category you can create? And how many times did you see only your comfortable mental maps of them?
Look at your management practices:
Where are you neutralizing otherness in the name of efficiency — and where is that genuinely necessary to protect something vital vs. where is it just your fear of the unpredictable?
When you “sustain tension without deciding,” are you being ethically responsible — or fleeing the responsibility of taking a position and being held accountable afterward?
Do the standards you establish protect life and enable coordination — or capture difference and domesticate competence?
Examine your power structures:
Can you admit that you don’t know the definitive answer to any of these questions — and still need to act, decide, lead?
Do your “diversity and inclusion” policies genuinely allow the Other to destabilize the organization’s premises — or do they only manage appearances while keeping the Same in control?
When was the last time someone without hierarchical power radically questioned a strategic decision — and was taken seriously, not just “heard”?
And the question that pierces all others:
Are you willing to tremble? To sustain the permanent tension of standing before Others you will never fully understand? To renounce total control while still needing to coordinate collective action? To accept that your organization will remain partially opaque — and that this is not a flaw to be corrected, but a condition of life to be sustained?

Alive organizations are not those that resolved these tensions through some revolutionary management model. They are those that accepted to tremble with them every day.
Without guarantees. Without definitive maps. Without total control. And transformed that tremor into a permanent source of renewal.
And you? Are you willing?
The Other — employee, colleague, subordinate, leader — is not a people analytics problem to be solved. It is an ethical summons to be answered. And you answer not by trying to capture them in yet another framework, yet another assessment tool, yet another management policy that promises to “finally understand people.”
You answer by accepting to stand before them — infinitely responsible for creating conditions for them to live, infinitely incapable of controlling how they will live, infinitely alive in the tension of the organizational encounter that never fully stabilizes.
This is the only culture worth building. The only one that doesn’t kill those who work in it to maintain the appearance of life. The only one where you can finally stop trying to be God — omniscient via people analytics, omnipotent via control structures, domesticator of otherness via totalitarian corporate culture — and accept to build something deeply human.
Limited. Incomplete. Imperfect. Trembling.
And precisely because of that, alive.

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