Drift
Organizations rarely become something unintended through one decision.
Organizations rarely become something unintended through one decision. They become it through a thousand reasonable ones.
No single meeting goes wrong. Each compromise is defensible on its own. But the small concessions accumulate in a direction, and the organization that exists a few years later is not the one anyone chose. It is the sum of choices no one was keeping track of. Where idea decay softens a single idea, drift bends the whole organization the same way, one reasonable step at a time.
Drift exists because every decision is made locally, by people optimizing for the meeting in front of them. No one is assigned to watch the direction of the whole. Reasonableness is the mechanism, not the safeguard: each step is too small to be worth resisting, and resisting a reasonable step is what looks unreasonable.
This is why leaders miss it. Drift has no event, no villain and no memo. There is nothing to point at, because nothing happened. By the time the gap is visible it is already the culture.
Why it matters
If no one owns the direction of the whole, the direction becomes whatever the path of least resistance prefers. The first question is not where do we want to go. It is where are we already going, and who would notice if it were wrong.