Foundation: Leadership & Accountability: What Does an Organisation Actually Learn When Leadership Becomes Harmful?
Annick Rogiers Founder, Sustainable Wellbeing Solutions - Connecting Psychological Safety, Psychosocial Risk and Organisational Practice
Not whether it responded — but whether anything changed in the conditions that allowed the situation to emerge.
When harmful leadership becomes visible, attention turns towards the leader. What happened? Who was affected? Was it investigated? Who is accountable?
These questions matter. But so does one more: what will the organisation learn from what happened?
Not what it documents. Not only which action it takes. But what it understands differently about the conditions that allowed the situation to emerge, continue, or become difficult to address.
Why isn't a response the same as learning?
Because a complaint can be investigated, a leader coached, a policy reviewed, training delivered — and the conditions can remain exactly as they were.
That leads to the harder question: if the leader changes but the conditions do not, has the organisation really learned?
Learning becomes meaningful only when it begins to influence how the organisation works: how information is connected, how leaders are selected and promoted, how performance is evaluated, how concerns involving power are escalated, how governance receives information.
Learning must change something.
Why do organisations stop at the first loop?
Because fixing an error without questioning the assumptions behind it is easier — and almost invisible.
Organisational learning research distinguishes two kinds. Single-loop learning asks what went wrong and how do we fix it, without altering the underlying values of the system. Double-loop learning asks the harder question: are the goals, assumptions and structures guiding our work still the right ones?
Organisations are usually good at the first and poor at the second. Research into why organisations fail to learn from incidents finds the breakdown is most visible at the point where investigation has to become action — and that learning from incidents "is not automatic and requires conscious and systematic steps to ensure it happens."
A closed case is not the same as a changed system.
What makes learning possible?
The willingness to question the organisation's own conditions — which is uncomfortable.
It means asking whether the problem was an individual exception or a predictable outcome of how work is designed, how power is distributed and how decisions are made. It means treating what was learned as a change to the system, not a lesson to be filed.
Perhaps the real test of learning isn't the quality of the investigation. It is whether the next situation is handled differently.
