Structural Parallels, Part 4: Operational Immersion
Part 4 of the Structural Parallels series. Part 1 established that recognizing structural parallels across domains accelerates transformation. Part 2 demonstrated that adaptive systems follow universal three-phase patterns. Part 3 revealed how cognitive biases scale into organizational architecture. This essay examines why external advisory models often fail to enable transformation and what operational immersion reveals that extraction cannot.
The Advisory Problem
Traditional consulting may operate as a subscription model disguised as project work. A recurring pattern appears across most advisory contexts: recommendations based on distant observation struggle during implementation, creating dependency cycles. This appears wherever expertise operates at distance:
Scientists who publish without understanding practitioner constraints
Politicians who legislate without dwelling in enforcement realities
Educators who design curriculum without observing actual learning conditions
The common failure mode: providing ideas without understanding the problem deeply enough to ensure implementability.
External expertise becomes privileged over internal capability, creating systems optimized for dependence rather than transformation. What appears as authoritative guidance often extracts organizational intelligence, repackages it, and sells it back: payment for access to knowledge the organization already possesses but cannot synthesize.
Knowledge Problem
Authority-based advisory operates through extraction: interviewing staff, analyzing data, benchmarking, delivering recommendations. Modern complexity demands contextual intelligence, not abstract frameworks. Data reveals what happens. Immersed participation reveals why it happens.
A process map shows official workflow. Only sustained observation reveals the informal networks, workarounds, and unspoken rules that keep operations functional when official systems fail.
As management scholar Henry Mintzberg observed, management tends to be a practice learned through experience, not a science analyzed from conference rooms.¹ What looks like progress on slides can collapse under operational reality because contextual intelligence often determines implementation success.
Organizations don't always lack information. They often lack synthesis.
Key employees may hold fragmented insights that never connect across silos.
Dasein: Knowledge from Being-There
The philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that authentic understanding requires Dasein (literally "being-there"): knowledge that emerges from immersion, not observation.² You cannot fully understand a system by studying it from outside.
Understanding requires participating in constraints, experiencing tensions, dwelling in operational reality. As organizational theorist Karl Weick noted, "How can I know what I think until I see what I say?" ³ Meaning emerges from action, not observation.
Abstract recommendations can fail because they ignore contextual constraints:
The reorganization that breaks trust networks
The process change that disrupts informal coordination
The software requiring five additional steps nobody has time for
The policy that conflicts with unstated cultural norms
Three-Phase Method: Immerse, Map & Identify
Immerse: Spend sustained time within the system. Surface-level analysis misses tacit knowledge: unarticulated understanding embedded in daily practice. ⁴
Frontline workers know which workarounds actually function
Middle managers know which approval processes get bypassed
Cross-functional staff know where handoffs consistently fail
Immersion builds trust. Advisors who work alongside staff gain credibility that conference room analysts rarely achieve. ⁵
Map: Identify the constraints, dynamics, and failure modes that define how the system actually works. Systems often reveal their true structure when they break down.
Identify: Look for domains that share structural characteristics, not surface similarities. Solutions emerge from recognizing parallel architectures across life cycle contexts.
Case: Contract Research Organization (CRO)
A 350-employee CRO suffered from systemic coordination failures across three critical areas:
Lead Generation Breakdown
Marketing deployed unfocused campaigns measuring activity (touches) rather than outcomes (conversions)
Operational Silos
No formal handoff process between Business Development and Operations
Client relationships fractured at transition points, eroding trust and continuity
Knowledge Concentration Risk
Rapid growth outpaced documentation systems
Critical institutional knowledge trapped with individual employees
Processes retrofitted after problems emerged, always playing catchup
The personnel immersed themselves in the Business Development department for three months. Not interviewing from outside. Not observing from conference rooms. Working alongside staff:
Attended meetings spanning marketing, services, contracting, technical, and software initiatives
Documented informal decision patterns and key personnel dependencies
Maintained trust through sustained participation rather than external judgment
What Actually Emerged
The CRO had chronic mismatches hidden by siloed operations, and incentivized by misaligned KPI’s
Data dictionary and infrastructure depended on one leader's knowledge
Operations, BD, and IT pursued separate AI initiatives
Enterprise data scattered from botched migration with no templates, no standards
New software deployed without consulting IT
Senior leaders held institutional memory that never reached operational staff
Core Insight
Through synthesis, the integrated personnel combined operational data with their on-the-ground experience. Visualizing the RACI matrix, they exposed the organization's systemic "hot potato" approach to accountability. This visualization proved the disconnect between leadership design and functional process, emerging from interviews that always began with: "What's your biggest pain point?"
The organization didn't need new strategy, shiny solutions, software, or instruments. All recommendations were by dictated by context to have zero cost. The system only needed someone to slow down and actually be there.
The CRO suffered from decision-making absence: Marketing strategized without seeing conversion failures. Leadership designed processes without experiencing handoffs. Every decision made by people removed from the work itself.
From Extraction to Synthesis
Every problem "discovered" was already visible to someone doing the work. But that knowledge stayed trapped at the operational level, buried under task lists, only surfacing when issues caused company-wide alarm.
The value wasn't expertise. It was presence. Three months of being there. Watching the actual handoff fail. Sitting through the redundant meetings. Following the data as it fragmented across systems. The synthesis happened naturally once someone with time to think experienced what everyone else just endured.
The Leadership Choice
Until organizations regard presence as they do analysis, they'll remain dependent on subscription consultants and imported executives who trim branches while ignoring what persists in the soil. Replace leadership, restructure departments, implement new software while ignoring what persists in the soil.
Implication
Organizations can distinguish extraction from synthesis with one test: an engagement either offers true curiosity and presence or delivers analytics as a product that must be purchased again. Extraction creates dependency. Synthesis creates capability.
Companies, governments, universities can and most likely will continue to take the Band-Aid approach because it's cheaper. Presence profits will continue to reward presence bias.
It is easier to outsource thought but it is not sustainable
It is simpler to buy reports than to build understanding
It is faster to import solutions than to develop them internally
The real product shouldn't just be advice. It's organizational sight. Encouraging companies and its employees to recognize their own patterns. Building the muscle to synthesize fragmented knowledge. Creating space for presence and analytics to inform decisions together.
Without this, the cycle continues. Organizations keep paying outsiders to explain what insiders experience every day. Not because they need the expertise, but because no one inside has the time, position, or permission to stop and see. The constraint isn't knowledge. It's presence.
References
Mintzberg, H. (2004). Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. Harper & Row.
Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage Publications.
Polanyi, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension. University of Chicago Press.
Schein, E. H. (1999). Process Consultation Revisited: Building the Helping Relationship. Addison-Wesley.