I'm trying to understand one company's behavior, which I think is just bizarre by any standard, and I think this video feed from MIT titled Stuck: Why It’s So Hard to Do New Things in Old Organizations can explain some of it.

The speaker, Rebecca Henderson, focused on overload loops - self-defeating cycles that organizations tend to invest much of their energy on but still spiral it into failure and doom. For a solution, she suggests a "worse before better" strategy, supposedly Tiger Woods' theory of change - a change that involves a drastic dip in performance at the beginning but produces better and more sustainable performance over time.

More importantly, this change involves core conversations and time for reflection. Sounds fuzzy-wuzzy. But people in organizations do lose their core sense of commitment and start behaving and talking around in cliches and in cliques.