As you read, you’ll realize that these Nine Lies have taken hold because each satisfies the organization’s need for control. Large organizations are complex places, and a strong and understandable instinct of their leaders is to seek simplicity and order—not least because this makes it easier to persuade themselves and their stakeholders that they are moving toward their objectives. But the desire for simplicity easily shades into a desire for conformity, and before long this conformity threatens to extinguish individuality. Before we know it, the particular talents and interests of each person are seen as inconveniences, and the organization comes to treat its people as essentially interchangeable.

The strong instinct of most corporate leaders, faced with the teeming diversity not just of gender, race, and age but of thought, drive, and relationship inside their organizations, is to look for some way to exert control—to rein it all in, to impose conformity on the chaos, and thence to be able to understand what’s going on, and to shape what will happen next. And so companies have spent, and continue to spend, large quantities of time and money trying to work around each person’s uniqueness—and this is where these models bubble up from.

Nature is eternally restless. It doesn’t sit still, it doesn’t wait for a catastrophe, it doesn’t ask permission, it doesn’t plan—it just tries stuff. The same needs to be true of your organization. That means letting people be as experimental at work as they are in the rest of their lives. In the words of the great management thinker, Elvis Presley, it’s time for “a little less conversation and a little more action.” So just go try something.

The dilemma is that when the challenges facing an organization are not about repeatable execution, but about innovation or responding to complexity, the idea of breaking things down into well-understood parts is not only unhelpful, it can also be a dangerous trap.

I have seen the consequences of attempting to shortcut this natural process of growth often in the business world, where executives attempt to “buy” a new culture of improved productivity, quality, morale, and customer service with strong speeches, smile training, and external interventions, or through mergers, acquisitions, and friendly or unfriendly takeovers. But they ignore the low-trust climate produced by such manipulations. When these methods don’t work, they look for other Personality Ethic techniques that will—all the time ignoring and violating the natural principles and processes on which a high-trust culture is based.