Schizophrenic organisations are almost without doubt a Thing.

In the case I have in mind, a friend of mine had considerable caring responsibilities for her elderly mother, who had dementia. Her employer, a red-brick university, had what was considered a highly enlightened set of “family-friendly” personnel policies. Yet when it came to actually applying those policies in the real world, there always seemed to be some impediment against making them work in the way they were supposed to; and it was always local managers who said “No, we can’t let you do that” and always their middle managers who backed them up, even to the point of commencing efficiency measures against my friend when she was forced to put her mother first in emergencies.

I think that in the current case of the Metropolitan Police, we are almost certainly seeing another schizophrenic organization.

When treating organizations as if they were individuals, I think that we would be quite safe in assuming schizophrenia. And only considering its possible absence should we observe considerable compelling evidence.

How does this work in practice when the senior officers of an organisation make a policy decision (and announce it widely, and get kudos for it), but the grass roots managers roll back on that policy because it’s organisationally inconvenient for them, and their middle managers collude with that roll-back?