I’ve seen organisations react to a dramatic increase in incidents with a call to strengthen belonging, team spirit and engagement, under a slogan like “We’re One Team!”. This sounds intuitive, though also a bit like Care Bears. Especially when you remember that most large organisations resemble complex adaptive systems far more than emotionally aligned friendship groups. Yet many organisations take exactly this route because it feels humane, relatable and immediately actionable.

But as I wrote in my piece on the problems with the Golden Circle, purpose and unity are stories we tell about the system, instead of mechanisms that actually organise it. Organisations sit at the intersection of competing demands, survival pressures and regulatory expectations and there is no single stable “Why” capable of coordinating a complex system. The same logic applies to safety culture; unity is a narrative instead of an organising principle.

 

Why community is reserved for small groups

People genuinely long for community. We’re often treated as role-bearers rather than full individuals, so it’s no surprise that corporate cultures repeatedly revive the promise of a strengthened we-feeling. But large communities behave very differently from small ones. Attempts to scale intimacy from small groups to large systems lead to fragmentation rather than unity.

Consensus is a variable. Instead of requiring full emotional alignment, large systems require clarity on which behaviours and constraints must be shared for the system to remain viable.

Emotional cohesion in small groups works because emotions are visible, shared and directly regulated. Large systems, however, develop layers of interdependence that are too complex to be coordinated by sentiment alone. They fragment into subcultures, accumulate divergent expectations and generate conflict when emotional promises fail. This is why the “One Team” message often produces the opposite of what leaders hope.

 

Ceremony, diplomacy and role expectations stabilise social life

Sociologist Norbert Elias wrote that as societies grow more differentiated, the balance between we and I changes. People still need belonging, but belonging can no longer take the form of simple emotional fusion. Before Elias, Helmuth Plessner already warned against romanticising closeness. Large social systems depend on distance, structure and indirectness because ceremony, diplomacy and roles stabilise social life far more effectively than shared feelings. Organisations survive because of constraints such as rules, boundaries and decision-conditions. When organisations try to run on emotional alignment, they often produce:

• narrow cliques
• “us versus them” dynamics
• selective loyalty
• decreased reporting
• behaviour that is calibrated to local norms rather than organisational intent

All of which undermine reliability, because emotional promises cannot replace systemic coordination.

 

It’s about balance

Emotion is not irrelevant. After a traumatic event, a shared emotional response can be essential for sensemaking, healing and human support. The difficulty arises when organisations try to transform such emotional moments into a long-term safety strategy. When survival pressures or structural ambiguities are the real problem, leaders mistakenly reach for purpose or unity as the fix.

Emotion can be a catalyst, but it cannot serve as the ongoing stabilising framework for complex work. As always, it’s about balance. That means acknowledging emotional reactions without making emotional harmony the control mechanism.

 

Three real-world cases that show the problem

Case 1 — Aetheron’s One-Team initiative

To improve safety, Aetheron launched a One-Team Safety Culture. Offshore crews bonded strongly but mainly with each other.

Results:

• local loyalty increased
• reporting dropped
• informal norms drifted away from corporate expectations

The system problem was misidentified as a purpose/motivation problem.

The “we-feeling” was activated at the wrong structural level, which intensified drift instead of stabilising it.

 

Case 2 — Northwind Infrastructure Group and the promise of unity

Northwind proclaimed safety as a top priority, reinforced its “right to go home safe” narrative, and promoted a One Team culture where everyone is encouraged to speak up. But organisations face multiple, competing “Why’s” instead of one master goal.

Northwind’s approach placed the burden of safety on emotional consensus; something a large, multi-partner system cannot realistically produce or sustain. Real safety depends less on shared sentiment and more on:

• interdependency design
• authority boundaries
• clear reporting processes
• constraint-programmes that guide decisions

Northwind’s intentions were admirable, but the mechanism was misplaced.

 

Case 3 — Southlink Infrastructure Alliance: strong narrative, different reality

Southlink emphasised a One-Team culture and Zero Harm aspirations. But the actual mechanisms that delivered safety were structural:

• clear permitting and decision rules
• consistent routines
• negotiated problem solving
• a unified safety database
• systematic recognition of drift
• structured handovers and design modifications

Survival comes first, constraints second, adaptation third, and purpose comes last, as the narrative layer that sits on top of a functioning system. Southlink succeeded not because everyone felt the same, but because the system was engineered to remain viable under complexity.

 

Invisible boundaries - why community doesn’t control drift

Jens Rasmussen’s work explains these patterns. Work unfolds within a space of possibilities bounded by: a. economic pressure; b. acceptable workload; c. production demands; d. safety constraints.

People adapt through small adjustments that follow the strongest gradient; usually toward efficiency. Because defences are redundant, early drift has no visible consequences. Organisations drift into solving the wrong problems through operationalisation and algorithmisation, both of which reduce complexity while unintentionally changing the problem frame. This is why “Care more about safety” or “Be One Team” don’t alter the gradients that influence everyday decisions.

 

Safety as a system function

Organisations don’t run on single master purposes, but on constraint architectures, decision structures, and survival conditions. Safety behaves more like a system function than an absolute value. “Zero Harm” or “Safety First” are narrative summaries; useful for sensemaking but not mechanisms of control.

 

Communication and means–ends reasoning

Systems maintain coherence through communication as pressures shift. Organisations work with means–ends reasoning: How do we keep risk within acceptable boundaries given everything else we must achieve? Purpose is not the engine of the system but the narrative that becomes possible once the system is viable. Purpose helps stabilise expectations, but it doesn’t regulate emotional alignment.

 

The backbone of safety

Functional stabilisation is the real backbone of safety. Large organisations don’t become safer through team spirit or emotional unity. They become safer when: a. decision boundaries are clear; b. work is substitutable; c. risk is made visible; d. structures tolerate variability in mood and motivation; e. feedback mechanisms detect drift early; f. trade-offs are surfaced rather than smoothed over. Purpose is the front-stage story of a backstage survival architecture.

Functional stabilisation is what neutralises drift and prevents the fragmentation witnessed at Aetheron and Northwind, while reproducing the systemic strengths of projects like Southlink.

 

Conclusion

Emotions matter; people bring their humanity to work every day. But systems must not depend on emotional harmony to stay safe. Organisations don’t fail because they lack a Why. They fail because they misdiagnose a survival or system-design problem as a purpose problem.

Working safely is possible when organisational structures handle variability, when the organisation's purpose reduces complexity rather than proclaiming absolutes, and when drift is counteracted through design instead of sentiment. When organisations get this right, people can bring their full selves to work but the stability of safe performance does not depend on everyone feeling the same way at the same time.

 

Sources

Elias, N. (1991), The Society of Individuals, New York/London: Continuum.

Luhmann, N. (1976), Funktionen und Folgen formaler Organisation, pp. 372-381, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.

Plessner, H. (1924), Grenzen der Gemeinschaft - Eine Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus, Bonn: Cohen.

Rasmussen, J. (1997), Risk management in a dynamic society: a modelling problem, Safety Science, Vol. 27, Iss. 2–3, Nov.–Dec. 1997, pp. 183-213.