Why Leaders Keep Swinging the Pendulum
Every few years organizations rediscover the same frustration and react the same way. Decentralization creates inconsistency, so leadership centralizes everything to restore control. Centralization slows growth, so leadership decentralizes again to regain speed. Each move solves a real problem. Each move also recreates a different one. The pattern isn’t limited to org charts. It shows up everywhere: brand vs. performance marketing, founder control vs. team autonomy, process discipline vs. entrepreneurial speed, central teams (COEs) vs. business units (BUs), and consistency vs. flexibility.
Most leadership debates are argued as if there is a right vs wrong. But the reality is they should be about which set of tradeoffs you’re willing to manage.
If this pattern feels familiar, it’s because it’s common. Organizations don’t swing between models because leaders are irrational or indecisive. They swing because the weaknesses of any system become painfully visible over time, while the benefits fade into the background. Meanwhile the alternative model looks clean, logical, and full of relief.
Until it isn’t. But many organizations never get that far.
Instead, they swing the pendulum.
The Pendulum Problem
When leaders experience the pain of one operating model, they naturally become attracted to the visible benefits of the opposite one. The conversation usually sounds something like this:
“We need more consistency.”
“We need more speed.”
“We need more accountability.”
“We need more autonomy.”
Each of those statements can be true. But they usually describe the weakness of the current model, not the superiority of the alternative. And when leadership treats the alternative like a clean solution instead of a different tradeoff system, the organization begins to swing.
A Familiar Example:
Business Units vs Centers of Excellence
I saw this play out almost yearly, early in my career. One year, companies reorganize around business units. The logic makes sense: decisions closer to the customer, faster execution, brand-specific strategy, and entrepreneurial energy.
But over time the weaknesses become obvious: duplication everywhere, inconsistent capabilities, uneven quality, and fragmented data and systems.
So leadership responds by building Centers of Excellence. That solves the consistency problem: standardized capabilities, shared expertise, operational scale, and clearer governance.
But now something else breaks. Brand teams feel constrained. Prioritization moves away from market opportunity toward internal queues. Speed slows. Growth stalls.
So the conversation begins again. Maybe we should go back to business units.
And the pendulum swings.
The Real Leadership Work
The problem isn’t choosing between business units and centers of excellence. Both are viable operating models. Both create advantages. Both create weaknesses. The mistake is believing that switching models will eliminate tradeoffs.
It never does. Leadership maturity begins the moment leaders stop chasing relief and start managing the tradeoffs they created. Because every meaningful operating decision creates a system of benefits and costs.
If you choose autonomy, you inherit fragmentation. If you choose standardization, you inherit rigidity. If you choose speed, you inherit inconsistency. If you choose control, you inherit friction.
The job of leadership isn’t escaping those tradeoffs. It’s choosing the system that best fits the strategy and then actively managing its weaknesses.
Why Organizations Swing Instead
The reason many organizations swing between poles is simple. The benefits of the current model fade into the background and become assumed as “our innate strengths.” The pain becomes visible. At the same time, the benefits of the alternative model look clean and attractive.
Every operating choice creates a polarity:
Choose This You Inherit This
Autonomy Fragmentation
Standardization Rigidity
Speed Inconsistency
Control Friction
Focus Opportunity cost
What leaders forget is that the current benefits weren’t accidental. They were structural. And when you abandon the system that created them, you abandon the benefits too. But because those benefits once felt natural, leaders assume they’ll persist. They won’t. They belonged to the system you just left.
Often you see that leadership puts their best minds on the task of capturing those benefits that come automatically with switching sides. No energy and focus on mitigating the loss of the previously inherited benefits that now become the drawback of your new system.
And the pendulum swings even further.
The Hidden Cost of the Pendulum
Every swing between operating models creates a familiar set of consequences:
transformation fatigue
abandoned capabilities
organizational confusion
distrust in leadership decisions
teams optimizing for the next reorg instead of the current one
Over time the organization stops believing in the system at all. People simply wait for the next swing.
Where Strategy Actually Begins
Most organizations don’t lack goals. They lack disciplined choices. Real strategy isn’t declaring ambition. It’s choosing between viable paths and accepting the consequences that come with them.
If the decision doesn’t involve a real tradeoff, it probably isn’t strategy.
It’s aspiration. And aspiration doesn’t stabilize systems.
Leadership isn’t the act of switching sides to harvest the obvious benefits of the other model. It’s the discipline of choosing a direction and then doing the harder work: mitigating the weaknesses that naturally come with it. The organizations that grow predictably aren’t the ones that found the perfect model. They’re the ones that stopped pretending a model should come without tradeoffs. They chose a direction. Then they did the harder work of managing the weaknesses that came with it
In practice, these pendulum swings show up when leadership loses alignment across four dimensions of the business: Vision, Structure, Culture, and Execution. When those drift apart, organizations compensate emotionally instead of structurally. And that’s when the pendulum starts moving.
Continue the Dialogue
If this pattern feels familiar, these blog posts explore other parts of the same system:
The Maturity Vacuum: Why Sludge, Drift, and Job Market Chaos Are All the Same Problem:
To understand why your organization’s complexity has outpaced its leadership patterns.
The Emotional Cost of Avoidance: Why Leaders Drift, Teams Overfunction, and Chaos Spreads:
To see how "politeness" and the avoidance of hard decisions trigger the pendulum in the first place.
The Maturity Vacuum: Why Drift Happens When Leadership Stops Evolving: To learn how to diagnose the "Operational Sludge" created when the pendulum swings too far.
Stay tuned, there will be more content coming soon that dives deeper into this phenomenon “That’s Not Strategy. It’s a Wish” and “Why Marketing Strategy Usually Isn’t Strategy.”
