When it comes to examining cases of organizational self-deception, the Boeing 737 MAX situation has it all. Two crashes between 2018 and 2019, organizational and legal fall-out extending into 20twenty-four. Never before has so much introspective documentation been made available to outside observers. And rarely has a more complete case of organizational self-deception been so consistently misinterpreted. You’ll find the usual story in popular discussions of the Boeing Crisis: the story of corporate greed overpowering safety culture. It’s true…but only to a point. The story stops short at the most visible, most morally legible explanation for Boeing’s problems. What’s visible tells us little about how Boeing got that way. To see that, we have to look at the structures that shaped its leaders’ decisions.

If you read through the lengthy DOJ report, listen to congressional testimonies, and pore over released internal documents, what you will not find is clear evidence that Boeing was populated by individuals who consciously traded away safety for profit. That narrative is simply not supported by the documentary record. Instead, what you will find is an organization that has, over time, developed incentives, procedures, and policies that have made it harder for accurate technical information to reach decision-makers and made it more costly for individuals who possess that information to deliver it. Bad decisions were made. But they were decisions that individual employees were incentivized to make and could defend as reasonable if challenged by their peers or supervisors.

How did Boeing reach a point where safe flights became riskier than they needed to be? As with most long-term accidents, a series of smaller decisions made sense in their immediate context but designed a system that was bound to produce bad outcomes. Engineering authority was slowly moved under financial authority beginning with Boeing’s merger with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. This change gradually decreased the formal decision-making authority and organizational stature of engineers relative to the roles of finance and production professionals. The supplier certification process was restructured to rely less on independent evaluation, precisely at the points in the production process where it was most needed. Reward structures for program managers penalized delays and budget concerns more than they penalized safety issues that were difficult to quantify. Decisions that deferred safety concerns were culturally safer than ones that raised those concerns. This last point has been well illustrated by the emails and internal discussions released as part of the congressional investigation.

At no point in these changes were decisions made with the goal of making unsafe aircraft. This is critical, and something that is consistently missed by critiques of the organization that focus on individual decisions. Each change in isolation was objectively defensible; they were rational responses to their specific contexts. Shifting decision-making authority to financial professionals was a response to concerns about cost overruns. Restructuring supplier oversight was done for operational reasons. Creating stronger incentives for rapid production was standard across aerospace. Each one, isolated from the larger case, makes sense. The problem is how they fit together. How those decisions designed a system that slowly degraded Boeing’s ability to acquire, process, and act on technical information.

The reason this is the hardest type of organizational self-deception to combat after the fact, and most dangerous to create within your own organization, is that it can happen while everyone is acting with the best intentions. It doesn’t require bad people. It doesn’t even really require deception in the sense of deliberate, malicious intent to mislead. All that is required is a structure that gradually makes it more rational, more comfortable, and socially rewarding to view ambiguous information as confirming your preferred conclusion, and more costly to view it as suggesting something you don’t want to be true. An organization that collects

The return-to-office mandates that proliferated through 2022 and into 2023 were almost universally justified on the grounds of productivity, collaboration, and culture. Almost universally, the evidence cited in support of these justifications was weak, selectively presented, or directly contradicted by the organizations’ own performance data from the preceding two years.

This is not an argument that remote work is superior to office work. It is an observation that the stated rationale for RTO mandates was, in most cases, not the actual rationale. Organizations that had demonstrably maintained or improved productivity during remote operations nonetheless mandated returns, dismissing their own evidence in favor of managerial intuition and, in some documented cases, explicit pressure from real estate commitments and middle management anxiety about relevance.

The behavioral mechanism at work is one that organizational research has documented extensively: motivated reasoning in the service of self-concept maintenance. Senior leaders who had built their careers in office environments, whose social identities were bound up with the culture of physical presence, and whose intuitions about productivity were formed in a world where presence and output were structurally conflated, could not process evidence that challenged those intuitions as genuine evidence. They processed it as noise to be explained away.

This dynamic was compounded by the structural position of middle management. Remote work had exposed, with uncomfortable clarity, the degree to which middle management value had been built on proximity functions: information relay, activity monitoring, coordination of physically co-located teams, and the social authority that comes from visible presence in organizational space. When those functions became either unnecessary or performable by technology, the relevance of the middle management layer became a legitimate question. RTO mandates restored the conditions under which that relevance was unquestioned.

The research on what actually drives organizational performance in knowledge work environments does not support the proposition that physical co-location is a significant independent variable. What the research does support is that certain specific activities, creative problem-solving that benefits from spontaneous interaction, onboarding of new employees, and the repair of damaged working relationships, are better performed in person. These activities represent a fraction of most knowledge workers’ time. Building an organization-wide mandate around them, at substantial cost to employee satisfaction and retention, reflects a choice to optimize for managerial comfort rather than organizational performance.

The employees who resigned in response to RTO mandates, in numbers sufficient to register in workforce data, were not primarily resigning because they preferred working from home. Many were indifferent to location as such. They were resigning because they had watched their organizations construct elaborate justifications for decisions that were plainly made on grounds other than the ones stated. The RTO debate, for many workers, was not about location. It was a legibility test. Organizations that stated one rationale while acting on another demonstrated, with clarity, the degree to which their stated values and their operational values were disconnected. Many employees drew the rational conclusion that an organization that could not be honest about why it wanted them in the office could not be trusted on questions of greater consequence.

The organizations that navigated this period most successfully were those that were honest about their actual reasons for wanting employees present, made specific rather than universal demands, and structured those demands around demonstrable organizational needs rather than managerial preference. Honesty about motivation, even when the motivation is not entirely flattering, produces better organizational outcomes than sophisticated justifications for decisions made on undisclosed grounds. This is not a moral observation. It is an empirical one.

When organizations face existential pressure, they do not become different. They become more fully what they already were. The COVID-19 pandemic, arriving in March 2020 with the force of a structural stress test no business school had designed, did not create organizational dysfunction. It illuminated it.

The organizations that failed workers in the early weeks of the pandemic, that withheld safety information, that misrepresented supply chain stability to shareholders, that told employees operations were safe when leadership privately knew otherwise, were not suddenly corrupted by crisis. They were organizations that had already developed robust internal capacities for self-deception. The pandemic simply removed the ambient noise that had allowed that self-deception to pass unnoticed.

What made the early pandemic period so instructive was the speed at which the gap between organizational communication and organizational reality became visible. Companies that had spent years constructing narratives of employee-centered culture were revealed, within weeks, to have no structural mechanisms for actually centering employees when doing so carried a cost. The narrative was real. The structure was not.

This is the distinction that most post-mortems miss. The question is never whether organizational leaders intended to deceive. In most cases, they did not. The question is whether the organization was structurally capable of receiving, processing, and acting on accurate information when that information was unwelcome. Most were not. The pandemic did not make them dishonest. It made their existing dishonesty consequential in ways that could no longer be absorbed.

The behavioral economics literature has long established that motivated reasoning operates below the threshold of conscious intent. Decision-makers do not experience themselves as filtering information. They experience themselves as exercising judgment. The pandemic compressed the feedback loop between motivated reasoning and organizational consequence to a degree that made this process visible in real time, across thousands of organizations simultaneously.

What should organizations take from this? Not that their leaders are dishonest people, but that their structures reliably produce dishonest outcomes regardless of the character of the people within them. The structural question is the only question that matters. Everything else is noise.