The Common Problem
Every organisation of any size eventually notices that the same nominal standard — a process, a documentation requirement, a quality threshold — is not actually applied the same way in every department that is supposed to follow it. This is usually read as a discipline or enforcement gap. Looked at across different types of department, the pattern is more specific than that, and it varies in a fairly consistent way depending on the nature of the department’s own work.
How It Presents in Practice
In departments with highly repetitive, measurable output — production lines, transaction processing, standardised service delivery — drift tends to appear as gradual, incremental adaptation. Small local variations accumulate over time, usually introduced because a specific local condition made a small departure sensible in the moment. Because the underlying work is repetitive and observable, these variations are the easiest kind of drift to detect, once someone looks for it, but they also compound quickly precisely because the work happens so often.
In departments with knowledge-intensive, judgement-heavy work — professional services, analysis, design — drift tends to look different. The nominal standard is often followed in name, with the actual judgement calls made underneath it varying considerably between individuals, because the standard itself cannot fully specify what “correct judgement” looks like in every situation. This kind of drift is harder to detect, because the visible artefacts can look identical while the process that produced them differed meaningfully.
In departments that interface heavily with external parties — sales, procurement, customer-facing operations — drift often originates from outside pressure rather than internal choice. A department adapts a standard because a customer, supplier, or regulatory context required it to, and that adaptation, sensible in its original context, persists after the specific external pressure that caused it has faded, because nobody revisits it once the immediate need has passed.
What Explains the Variation
Jay Galbraith’s information-processing framework offers a useful lens on why these different contexts produce different drift patterns rather than a uniform one. His argument is that organisational structure — including the standards that govern how work is done — exists to manage a certain level of task uncertainty and interdependence. Departments differ substantially in how much genuine uncertainty their work actually involves day to day, and a single, uniform standard, written centrally, inevitably under-specifies some of that local uncertainty and over-specifies the rest. Where it under-specifies, departments fill the gap with local judgement, which produces drift specific to that department’s own conditions. Where it over-specifies, compliance becomes a matter of appearance rather than substance, which produces a different, quieter kind of drift.
This same logic connects to the distinction Erik Hollnagel, Robert Wears and Jeffrey Braithwaite draw between work as formally imagined and work as it is actually done. A centrally written standard necessarily imagines a generic version of the work it governs. Every department’s actual conditions differ somewhat from that generic imagined version, and the gap between the imagined standard and the department’s actual conditions is precisely where local adaptation — and therefore drift — originates. Because each department’s actual conditions differ from every other department’s in different ways, the resulting drift is not random noise; it is a fairly direct, legible signature of where each department’s real work diverges most from the standard’s original assumptions.
The consistent thread across all three contexts is that drift is rarely pure non-compliance. It is much more often a local, largely rational adaptation to a gap between a generic standard and a specific reality — which is also why it recurs reliably across every organisation that operates more than one kind of department, however diligently standards are communicated and reinforced.
There is a consequence worth naming that compounds specifically in multi-department organisations: because drift originates independently in each department, in response to that department’s own local conditions, the resulting variations are rarely compatible with each other even when each is individually sensible. A repetitive-work department’s incremental adaptation and a judgement-heavy department’s underneath-the-surface variation are different in kind, which means a single, uniform effort to “re-align everyone to the standard” tends to work unevenly at best — a method that successfully addresses one department’s kind of drift may have little purchase on another department’s, because the underlying mechanism producing the drift is genuinely different in each case.
A further misconception is worth naming plainly: standards drift is often treated as a single phenomenon requiring a single explanation, when the evidence points toward at least three structurally distinct mechanisms operating simultaneously across different parts of most organisations. Diagnosing which mechanism is at work in a specific department, before assuming the cause is the same one found elsewhere, appears to be a materially different and more productive starting point than treating drift as a uniform compliance issue.
There is a further pattern worth noting across all three department types: the department that adapts most visibly is not necessarily the department with the largest actual gap between standard and reality. Repetitive-work departments, precisely because their drift accumulates in observable, measurable ways, tend to attract disproportionate scrutiny once drift is noticed anywhere in the organisation. Judgement-heavy departments, where the same underlying dynamic is at work but the resulting drift is far less visible, can carry an equally significant gap between standard and practice for considerably longer before anyone examines it — not because the gap is smaller, but because the nature of the work makes it harder to see.
The same pattern appears across many kinds of organisation; see Other Sectors for how it is read elsewhere.
Questions worth considering
- Which of the organisation’s departments handle highly repetitive work, which handle judgement-heavy work, and does the drift pattern in each match what this article describes?
- Where a standard is being followed in name but not in substance, has anyone examined what gap between the standard and local reality is driving that?
- Which standards were written centrally without direct input from the departments now adapting them locally?
More on this topic: Operations.
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