Introduction

Organizational development practitioners, leadership advisors, HR professionals, coaches, and transformation specialists often sit in a peculiar position in relation to organizations. Whether working internally or brought in as external advisors, they are invited to help teams reflect, surface tensions, and improve how decisions are made.

They listen across departments. They observe patterns. They notice shifts in tone, energy, and language that others may not immediately see. From the outside, this work can look straightforward. Facilitate the conversation. Offer insight. Help the group move forward. Inside the system, the experience is more complex.

Practitioners frequently encounter contradictions long before those contradictions appear in formal reporting or leadership discussions. These moments often surface first through humor, small remarks, or slightly exaggerated comments that circulate quietly around the edges of formal discussion.

Across conversations with practitioners working in organizational development, leadership advisory, HR, coaching, and transformation roles, a set of recurring patterns appears.

The following observations capture what practitioners repeatedly report encountering when working inside what might be called the field of organizational absurdity.

Observation 1: Practitioners Notice Absurdity Signals First

Evidence

Practitioners described encountering situations such as:

• A leadership team announcing three “top strategic priorities,” each labeled as the organization’s number one priority.

• An organization launching a major transformation initiative while quietly introducing two additional transformation programs in parallel.

• A team being told to “move faster” while also being required to obtain approval from five additional governance committees.

• A company declaring a commitment to innovation while requiring business cases for ideas that assume a five-year return forecast.

What’s Up With That?

Practitioners often work across functions, teams, and leadership layers. This gives them visibility into patterns that remain fragmented for others. They see how decisions in one part of the organization ripple into another.

As a result, practitioners frequently detect contradictions before they become visible in formal reporting or leadership conversations. However, noticing signals and naming them are not the same thing. Many practitioners say they lack safe ways to surface these observations constructively.

Why It Matters

When early signals remain unspoken, organizations lose opportunities to recognize misalignment while it is still manageable. Instead, tensions accumulate quietly until they eventually surface as stalled initiatives, disengagement, or repeated cycles of restructuring.

Practitioners are often seeing the signals early. The challenge is finding ways for the system to notice them as well.

Observation 2: Humour Often Appears Before Formal Problem Recognition

Evidence

Practitioners described hearing comments such as:

• “This initiative is different. Last year we called it Transformation 2.0. Now it’s Transformation Reimagined.”

• “Don’t worry about the reorganization. We got this. It’s our fourth one in three years.”

• “Our culture survey says people want fewer meetings… so we created a committee to study meeting reduction.”

• “We’ve decided to simplify the strategy. It’s now seven priorities instead of nine.”

These comments are usually delivered with a laugh.

What’s Up With That

Humor often appears when people recognize a contradiction but lack a safe way to discuss it directly. Jokes allow tension to surface indirectly. They provide a socially acceptable way to acknowledge something that feels misaligned. Rather than dismissing these moments as cynicism, many practitioners interpret them as early signals that something in the system deserves closer attention.

Why It Matters

When humor begins circulating around the same topic repeatedly, it often indicates that the official narrative of the organization and the lived experience of employees have begun to diverge. Handled carefully, these moments can open space for reflection rather than confrontation. For practitioners paying attention, humor is often the first visible signal that something important is happening beneath the surface.

Observation 3: Practitioners Are Part of the System They Are Supporting

Evidence

Practitioners described moments such as:

• Being introduced as “the person who asks uncomfortable questions.”

• Watching a room suddenly become more cautious after they ask a single clarifying question.

• Realizing that the questions they choose to ask shape which issues the group begins discussing.

• Being quietly warned by a leader before a meeting: “Just so you know… this topic is politically sensitive.”

What’s Up With That?

Practitioners are not neutral observers. In many reflective and advisory professions this idea is often described as “self as instrument”. The practitioner’s presence, interpretation, and questions influence what becomes visible in the room. What practitioners notice is shaped by what complexity researchers sometimes describe as salience. Our experiences, identities, and roles shape which signals stand out to us.

Why It Matters

Recognizing this dynamic changes the practitioner role. Rather than standing outside the system diagnosing problems, practitioners are embedded within it. Their questions, interpretations, and presence influence what the group notices and what remains unseen.

This means the practitioner is not simply applying tools or frameworks. They are actively shaping the conditions in which the system begins to see itself. When practitioners become aware of this influence, they can use it more intentionally. Their curiosity, attention, and framing of questions can help surface signals that might otherwise remain hidden.

In complex organizational environments, this awareness becomes an important part of the work itself. The practitioner’s presence can create the space where contradictions are noticed, assumptions are examined, and new interpretations begin to emerge.

Observation 4: Practitioners Develop Their Own Language for Navigating Contradictions

Evidence

Practitioners frequently use phrases such as:

• “Let’s socialize the idea first.”

• “We need to go slow to go fast.”

• “We’ll take that offline.”

• “We’re still aligning stakeholders.”

• “This initiative requires a bit more runway.”

Within practitioner communities, these phrases often trigger immediate recognition.

What’s Up With That?

Like many professional communities, practitioners develop informal language that helps them interpret recurring dynamics in organizations. However, this language does not appear in a single uniform form.

Within the broader practitioner landscape, different communities develop their own sub-pattern languages. HR professionals, OD practitioners, leadership advisors, and coaches often use slightly different expressions to describe similar situations. These patterns can become even more specific within a particular organization depending on the history and role of that function.

Over time, these phrases become a kind of shorthand. They allow practitioners to quickly recognize familiar dynamics without needing to unpack the entire situation each time. In this sense, practitioner language functions as a form of informal translation for complex organizational patterns.

Why It Matters

This shared language reflects the accumulated experience of practitioners working inside complex systems. It represents a form of collective sensemaking about how organizations actually behave, often extending beyond the formal language of strategy, policy, or leadership messaging.

For practitioners themselves, this language plays an important role in orientation. It helps them quickly interpret what they are seeing and make sense of the dynamics unfolding around them before deciding how to intervene. At the same time, this language carries influence. The words practitioners choose shape how situations are interpreted by others.

Experienced practitioners are aware of this dynamic. They understand that the language used to describe a situation can either open space for reflection or quietly reinforce existing assumptions. Used thoughtfully, practitioner language can help groups notice patterns more clearly and explore them constructively. Used carelessly, it can unintentionally narrow how a situation is understood. Recognizing this influence is therefore part of the practitioner’s work.

Observation 5: Looking for Ways to Work with Signals

Evidence

Practitioners described situations such as:

• A team joking that the organization has “a strategy for every quarter.”

• Leaders privately acknowledging a contradiction but saying “Let’s not open that discussion right now.”

• A workshop where participants quietly laugh when a slide appears titled “Clear Accountability Model.”

• A practitioner describing their role as “holding up a mirror the organization isn’t always ready to look into.”

What’s Up With That?

Practitioners often find themselves working inside what might be called an Absurdity Field. This field emerges when contradictions between strategy, structure, and lived experience begin to accumulate. The signals are visible, but they have not yet been interpreted collectively.

Within this space a particular function sometimes appears. It resembles what might be described as the System Jester. Historically, court jesters held a unique position. Through humor, exaggeration, and satire they could surface tensions that others could not safely name.

In modern organizations this role is less about a specific individual and more about a function that emerges within the system. Through humor, irony, metaphor, or playful exaggeration, contradictions can surface in ways that invite curiosity rather than defensiveness.

Practitioners frequently create the containers where this function can appear. They design conversations, workshops, and reflective spaces where signals can surface safely and where people can explore what those signals might mean.

Why It Matters

In complex organizational environments, contradictions and weak signals often appear long before problems become visible in performance metrics or formal reporting.

These signals can function as early warnings that something in the system is misaligned. The System Jester function becomes increasingly important in these contexts because it helps systems notice those signals early. Rather than ignoring absurdities, practitioners can treat them as prompts for reflection. When surfaced constructively, these signals can support:

• better decision making

• more realistic planning

• earlier identification of emerging tensions

• more honest conversations about organizational dynamics

In this sense, practitioners are not simply observing absurdity. They are helping organizations develop the capacity to notice and interpret early warning signals before contradictions harden into larger problems.

Insight Summary

Taken together, these observations point to a distinctive role that practitioners often occupy in relation to organizations. Whether working internally or as external advisors invited into the system, practitioners frequently find themselves positioned close enough to daily dynamics to notice emerging tensions while remaining somewhat outside the formal authority structures that shape decisions.

Because they move across teams, functions, and leadership layers, practitioners often encounter contradictions earlier than others in the system. These tensions rarely appear first in formal reports or strategic discussions. Instead, they surface through humor, informal language, and small moments of recognition that circulate around the edges of official conversation.

This places practitioners in a particular part of organizational life. They are not standing outside the system diagnosing problems after the fact. They are embedded in the dynamics of the system itself, noticing signals as they begin to emerge. What often appears in these moments is what might be described as the Absurdity Field, the space where contradictions between strategy, structure, and lived experience begin to surface but have not yet been fully interpreted.

Within this field, humor, satire, and exaggeration can act as early signals that something in the system deserves closer attention. These signals are rarely problems in themselves. Instead, they are indications that the system may be struggling to reconcile competing pressures.

For practitioners, the challenge is not simply noticing these moments but learning how to work with them. When approached constructively, absurdity signals can become starting points for reflection, helping organizations recognize tensions earlier and explore them before they harden into larger problems.

We are almost halfway through the year, and I want to give you the one pattern that has reorganized how I see almost everything in the field. It started as a nagging question: why do the worst meetings so often look like the best ones? And it resolved into something I cannot now unsee. The absurdity is not always the glitch. Sometimes, the absurdity is doing a job.

The strange, circular, slightly surreal quality of so much modern work is not always the system falling apart. Sometimes it is the system holding itself together, staying coordinated, keeping everyone reasonably comfortable, and continuing on a version of reality it can no longer fully see. Once you notice that absurdity is functional, you start seeing the function everywhere. Here is the scene that made it click.

The Good Meeting Problem

The meetings that go sideways are not always the ones that go badly. Sometimes they are the ones that go beautifully. The calendar invite, the agenda, and the slides all look polished in that very corporate way. There is catering and coffee. And cookies! Everyone seems capable, prepared, and professionally pleasant, and a calm atmosphere of people about to discuss something important.

The thing I notice at first is that the Chair is late. The group begins without him. Someone opens the deck, offers a quick context-setting comment, and the first few slides move cleanly. Risks have already been gently renamed “dependencies.” A concern hovers near the edge of the conversation, not quite entering, not quite leaving. People are talking around something, but elegantly. Olympic-level talking around.

The Circus With Catering

That is when I notice the elephant in the corner, eating cookies. It has probably been there the whole time. Large, present, crumbs on its trunk, standing beside the catering tray with the relaxed confidence that maybe this time it’ll be official. A few people see it. You can tell by the darting eyes that flick back to the slide. Another does that tiny inhale people do when reality arrives slightly ahead of the agenda. Someone else scans the room for signs of life that people are noticing the elephant, or about to become the difficult one. For a second, the room knows. Then the presenter clicks forward, and everyone returns to the deck with the intense devotion of people trying to make the slide more real than the mammal.

Everyone saw the elephant. Then the slide advanced.

Ten minutes later, the Chair arrives. Or, more accurately, the emperor arrives. He opens the door, apologizes with executive confidence, and walks across the front of the room in full strategic nudity. No one stops the meeting. A few people notice immediately, a few seem not to at all. A handful calculate the social cost of noticing, then become suddenly fascinated by their notebooks. He takes his place at the front, thanks everyone for their patience, and proceeds with complete seriousness, speaking about alignment, confidence, and the need to move decisively into next quarter.

Then, with the full authority of a man wearing nothing but governance, he asks the room to discuss the robe strategy. Nobody says, “Are we going to talk about the fact that there are no robes?” Nobody asks whether the wardrobe plan has dependencies. The room adjusts, because that is what rooms do. The elephant keeps eating the cookies. The emperor keeps chairing the meeting. The deck keeps advancing.

Then someone near the end of the table makes a comment. Not loud, not confrontational, just one of those small remarks that arrives half-joke, half-weather system. “Love the robe strategy. Tiny question about the breeze.” There is a small laugh.

Ah. The jester.

Not the kind with bells or a lute, because procurement would absolutely classify both as non-essential spend, but the modern version: a laptop, a name badge, and just enough humour to say the thing without officially saying the thing. And for one second, the room is holding it. But like a hot potato. Holding the signal. The truth that just entered sideways. Everyone feels the heat. Someone smiles, someone looks down, someone says “fair point” in the tone people use when a point is absolutely not about to become fair. Then the potato moves, from joke to smile, from smile to silence, from silence to the next agenda item, until it is set down gently beside the cookies, where the elephant considers it a snack. Next slide.

The signal broke through. The system recognized it. The procession continued.

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What the Room Could Not Use

That is the pattern I keep seeing in the field. The issue is not that nobody knows. The knowing is usually there, but it arrives in pieces. One person sees the elephant, another senses the emperor problem, a third makes the joke, and a few more feel the tension but read it differently. The room has fragments of contact with reality, but the fragments never become shared enough, legitimate enough, or stable enough to reshape what the room believes is happening.

That is where functional absurdity begins. When a capable room keeps functioning on a picture it can no longer fully see. The elephant stays unnamed, the emperor stays dressed by consensus, the jester’s truth gets filed under comic relief, and the decision holds because the official version of reality has been kept just coherent enough to continue.

Why This Matters

This matters if you lead, advise, facilitate, govern, or simply sit in rooms where consequential things get decided by people using the word “alignment” with notable confidence. Because this pattern almost always gets diagnosed as something we already have tools for: a strategy problem, an execution problem, a communication problem, an organizational design problem. So we reach for the familiar remedies. Better strategy, cleaner execution, clearer roles, another framework, another meeting about why the last meeting did not land. Those things may help. But they miss the deeper issue if the system has already lost contact with the reality it is trying to respond to.

You can align beautifully around an incomplete picture.

You can execute flawlessly on the wrong read. You can restructure a system that has not yet noticed what it is adapting around, and you can make a clean decision in a room that has quietly edited out the one thing it most needed to understand. What sits underneath all of this is the black box most organizations rarely examine: the conditions that determine what a room can perceive, say, hold, and act on in the first place. Whether a signal becomes visible, whether it sticks, whether it counts enough to shape action, none of that is neutral. It is shaped by authority, timing, language, incentives, history, fatigue, identity, social risk, and by the quiet choreography of what the room has learned to treat as sayable.

Field Paper 02 - Orientation Capacity

That is the underbelly that Field Paper 02 goes after: why knowing so often fails to become doing, how capable systems drift out of contact with reality while everything still appears to function, and why the usual fixes keep missing the orientation problem underneath.

A note before you click: this is a serious working paper, not a breezy skim between emails while pretending not to check Teams. It leans academic because it is doing the foundation-building work: theory, field pattern, diagrams, examples, and contribution to the field. But there is a lot of juicy material in there, and the figures genuinely help you see the dynamics. There is an Overview version at the site as well. It is also a working paper, which means I am very interested in the conversation it can start. I want to know what connected for you and what you would push on or curious delving into further.

The knowing was there. The room was simply organized, in that moment, to keep it from becoming doing. That is the part worth carrying. Functional absurdity is not the system falling apart. It is the system holding together around an incomplete picture. And once you can see the function, you can start to ask what it is protecting, what it is avoiding, and what it would take for the room to stay in contact with what it already half-knows.

If you have ever sat in a meeting where everyone knew something and the room quietly organized itself around not saying it, this is the paper that explains the machinery. You have been in that meeting. This is for you.

Read Orientation Capacity → Field Paper

The investigation continues, and I would genuinely like to hear what it helps you see in your own rooms.

The full archive remains available at Behaving Badly HQ.

Issue 012 | June 2026

The survey says people are exhausted. The action plan adds three meetings. One is called a listening session. One is called a reset. One is called “Moving Forward Together,” which is usually the part where everyone quietly begins updating their résumé in a separate tab.

Nobody planned this as satire. That is the important part. Someone probably meant well. Someone probably had a spreadsheet. Someone probably said, “We need to show we’re taking this seriously.” And then, through the ordinary machinery of organizational life, the signal was processed into something almost perfectly designed to miss the point.

That is what The Brief has been tracking for eleven issues.

As you know, we have never considered this “bad behaviour” in the cartoon villain sense. Not workplace gossip. Not another round of “leaders should communicate better,” although yes, that remains available as a hobby.

The Brief has been paying attention to the moments where the official story and the lived reality stop making eye contact. The restructure is called a transformation. The burnout is called resilience. The confusion is called change readiness. The thing everyone knows is happening becomes the thing no one can quite say in the room where it matters.

Our Terrain

The Brief started on LinkedIn because LinkedIn is where workplace absurdity lives close to the surface. The polished announcement, the real reaction, the leadership language, and the comments people almost post all show up in the same scroll.

You showed up. You sent messages. You helped gather field research from around the world. You said, “This happened in my meeting yesterday, but I did not have a word for this until now.” You sent examples from inside systems that looked completely normal from the outside and deeply sideways from the inside.

That was always the intent: to notice the patterns together, make sense of what we were seeing, and give language to the things people were experiencing but could not always name.

Thank you for that.

The Brief was BBHQ’s field note. A way of tracking the signals, contradictions, patterns, and strangely well-catered nonsense showing up in organizational life.

But the Work Has Been Growing

The field papers are now live on GitHub, which is becoming an interactive research site with elements designed to give a felt sense of orientation, signal, and the shifting terrain we are all trying to navigate.

The essays have just started on Age of Absurdity. The research is deepening. And the Age of Absurdity project is becoming a larger public inquiry into what happens when people, teams, and systems lose the ability to orient inside conditions that no longer make sense. It is also where the public writing around my book-in-progress, The Age of Absurdity, is beginning to unfold.

And some signals need more room than a passing scroll.

Our Move to Age of Absurdity

Beginning with Issue 013, The Brief continues here at The Age of Absurdity. Same BBHQ field lens. Same monthly rhythm. Same interest in the moment where the slide deck says one thing and everyone’s nervous system says another. The format will settle into five observations from the field, what they signal, and a question worth sitting with.

Behaving Badly HQ remains the archive and satirical workplace lens behind The Brief. The deeper conversation now continues here.

Question: What is one conversation in your workplace that keeps showing up everywhere except the room where it actually needs to happen?

The Brief is published monthly by BBHQ, the field research and commentary arm of InSpark Group. It tracks workplace absurdity as a signal of what’s shifting in organizational life and what that means for the people inside it. The Age of Absurdity, a public inquiry into what happens when people, organizations, and systems lose their ability to orient includes field papers, interactive essays, and the Orientation Intelligence Lab.

Age of Absurdity on Substack | Age of Absurdity Research/Lab Hub | BBHQ Site | InSpark Group Site