Organizations are complex things, yes? They’re pretty complicated, right? (Dang you, Avril Lavigne.) If they were super easy to understand, healthy culture would be the norm and change efforts would be a breeze. As you know, neither of those things is true in a general sense.

I think part of the difficulty for us is that sometimes we fail to really wrestle with just how peculiar and downright odd organizations are and can be. We know that clumps of humans working together can make for exciting and challenging environments, but there’s also an awful lot of…well…weirdness, right? The organization moves and shakes in ways we don’t anticipate (although I think it’s good for an organization to Get Jiggy With It every once in a while), and it responds to things differently than we imagined it would.

It might be helpful for us–whether we’re front line employees, leaders, managers, or executives–to acknowledge that and work to understand a few things:

1. Organizations are anything but simple. Organizations are essentially groups of humans, yes? Well, it’s pretty difficult to accurately and consistently predict the behavior and reactions of large groups of people. This is especially true as an organization gets bigger, and there’s this tapestry of different sorts of folks woven together into an often-tangled mass of humanity. Are there some general assumptions we can make about an organization? Sure. But don’t mistake our ability to make some general assumptions as evidence that organizations are simple, because they’re anything but.

2. Organizations are unpredictable; shocking, even. With groups of humans, or even just individual humans, you might expect a given thing, but that thing may or may not actually play out (do yourself a favor and watch the video–you need to laugh a little). Decisions we make today–even what appear to be excellent decisions–can and often do have unforeseen consequences in the future. A strategic adjustment to how your organization interacts with the market, while great from a strictly strategic perspective, can have very negative consequences on your people. Or maybe it’s the flip side of the coin and a decision that seems good from a people perspective ends up actually being an impediment to the business performing well. With so many moving parts, and so many moving humans, absolute certainty is impossible to obtain.

3. Organizations are tricky. Organizations, and the folks within them, often conceal weaknesses and mistakes for whatever reason. Sometimes that’s the result of environmental pressures and norms; other times it’s due more to an individual’s inability to cope with such things. Still other times it’s a nasty cocktail of the two together. It’s easy to blame the concealing of weaknesses or even outright deception on individual character flaws, and that certainly could be part of it; but often it points to a larger, systemic issue at the same time. A senior leader at a large government organization stated it succinctly in the aftermath of 9/11: “Communications in organizations are rarely candid, open, or timely.” We’ve got to stop and ask ourselves why that feels like the norm to a lot of folks.

4. Organizations are nebulous. Clumps of humans, with their inherently different motivations, behaviors, and unpredictability, can create an environment where there’s a distinct lack of clarity. People are suspicious of each other, and even more suspicious of folks in leadership positions. What happens within the organization begins to be shrouded in mystery. Figuring out what’s actually, underneath it all, going on in a place is very, very difficult. It’s hard to get at the facts, and even harder still to figure out what to do with them once you’ve unearthed them. This lack of clarity can be the result of a multitude of different factors and combinations thereof. It could be a lack of information. Or there could be plenty of information, but it’s incomplete. Or there could be plenty of complete, accurate information, but individuals or groups interpret it differently. Sometimes information can be flat-out wrong or deceptive. That obviously doesn’t help anything.

I think it’s good for organizations to acknowledge this sort of stuff and work together toward cultivating a culture within which these sorts of things are at least mitigated and minimized. You’ve just got to roll up your sleeves and get elbow deep in it together.