One of its mainstays is the privileging of agency over structure. The cult of the individual that crawled naked into the psychedelic sunlight of the sixties has been coopted by The Establishment it sought, originally, to challenge - recast as the ultimate consumer, the Boomers have been proselytised into performativity. And blame.
By fostering competition - between institutions, between "devolved" organisational units within institutions, and between the individuals within the units - the focus has shifted from systems to people. People are rewarded, or otherwise, as individuals, based on their performance as individuals. They are weighed and measured against other individuals. Outcomes are deemed attained or not due to the performance of individuals. Systems are overlooked.
Performance can be improved - at individual, organisational unit or institutional level - the myth holds, through increased individual performance. Work harder, reads the subtext, and things will get better. And so, individuals work harder, burn out, work harder still... and little changes. Because looking beyond the individual would raise questions that can't be asked, provoke answers that shouldn't be whispered. Raise fears that are best left sleeping.
Occasionally, the trauma of restructuring bites. Usually within an organisational unit, or subunit. At a structural, rather than a process, level. And so no one questions the alignment of processes - particularly those beyond a single organisational unit - with each other, or the alignment of processes, policies and procedures, with core strategies or principles. Even AIMS baulked at doing this, restricting its role to PASS departments, bypassing the Faculties as if these simply clipped on like Lego bricks.
And so individuals are left with a distorted sense of their influence - an inflated sense of agency, which leads to implosion when it gets rightsized as it bumps up against the impenetrability of structure. The irresistable force meeting the immovable object finds itself less irresistable than it imagined. Disappointment, disillusionment, disempowerment. And, often, depression. Or departure. A sense, somehow, of failure, of blame. Followed by helplessness and disengagement. Demotivation.
And then, we wheel out the quality evangelists...