You know you’re in a troubled organization when senior managers meet new ways of thinking (new now to this organization, even if the idea is widely understood and followed by others) with:

We’ve never done it that way.

We could never do it that way because …

Why should we listen to you? You’ve never done it our way.

<CEO’s name> would never let us do that. We’ve tried it before and it’s never worked.

They (the customers) will just have to change their expectations if they are unsatisfied.

Usually in such places, no good deed goes unpunished, and it is far better to do nothing than be perceived as an agent of discord and change, surely a “career-ending move” if there ever was one in these places..

Organizations are self-replicating beasties — we become largely what we already are, only more so — and usually this will be along the lines of attitudes and practices of senior managers, but may burrow itself even more deeply. This can be very subtle, and difficult to observe, particularly if you yourself are part of that cohort of the organization by virtue of age, experience, or (mostly) white maleness. You may not notice your own ossification, as the years add up, and your own practice goes unchallenged.

Longevity in a single role in general is not positive for the working individual or the organization itself, especially in rapidly changing areas like medicine or technology. 15 years or more in IT — not uncommon in the academy — without continuous training and self-renewal leads to ossified practice, stagnant silos of “how we do it” if the doing is not itself subject to intense scrutiny, and a general inability to do “the new” if “the new” is of interest at all.

So while you are encouraged to “love what you do”, but be sure to do it in a place you can love. And if you ever find yourself saying one of the statements at the top of this post, examine whether it may not be time to find a place that can accept doing it differently as long as you can do it differently yourself.