What Holds Systems Together Isn’t Always Visible

What Holds Systems Together Isn’t Always Visible

There’s something we don’t talk about enough at board level: goodwill. Reflecting on a recent post from Catherine Marriott, I found myself thinking about goodwill in terms of resilience or exposure.

In complex systems, goodwill is everywhere. It shows up in the extra call, the honest conversation before things escalate, and the decision to stay engaged when the system is making it harder, not easier, to do so. For years, I saw this hold things together. When processes didn’t quite work, when structures didn’t align, and when demand outpaced capacity, people compensated for the system, quietly, consistently, professionally, and often successfully.

Which creates a problem, because from a board perspective that can look like performance. The metrics hold, the reports reassure, and the system appears to function. But underneath, something else is happening. Goodwill is not a design feature, it is a system response. In the Blueprint for Intentional Systems, I have found that when purpose, people and process fall out of alignment, the system compensates, usually through the discretionary effort of good people. That can sustain performance for a long time, but it also masks fragility, and when goodwill is exhausted, what looked stable can unravel quickly.

So the question for boards is not simply whether the structure works on paper, it is whether the system is designed to produce sustainable performance, or whether it is quietly relying on effort that sits outside governance. Because one is resilience, and the other is exposure.