Walk as done, walk as imagined
LEADERSHIP FROM THE INSIDE
Why the hardest part of any change, whether led by technology or not, is the work you have never watched
There is a photograph I return to often. Two paved paths meet around a patch of grass, and across the grass runs a worn brown line, a shortcut cut into the earth by thousands of feet that had no intention of following the route the designer laid down. The planners imagined one path. The people walked another. The grass keeps the score.
That worn line has a name. Human factors researchers call it a desire path, and it is the clearest illustration I know of a distinction that sits at the heart of every change I have led or studied. There is work as it is imagined, drawn on process maps, written into policy, presented to a board on a slide. And there is work as it is done, in the moment and under pressure, by people who have learned where the real route lies. The two are never quite the same.
McKinsey’s recent survey, From adoption to impact, makes an argument I share. Value does not appear because more people use the tools. It comes from redesigning the work around what the technology makes possible, and from treating the effort as organisational change rather than a technology rollout. The paper records a wide gap. Seventy per cent of employees feel personally ready for AI. Only twenty-seven per cent of leaders believe their organisations are ready to change around it. Organisational readiness, the authors find, explains almost twice as much of the difference between the firms capturing value and those still waiting for it.
I would put that finding a plainer way. The employees are already walking the desire path. The organisation is still designing the paved one.
There is a difficulty buried inside the instruction to redesign the workflow. A workflow cannot be redesigned if it has never been seen. Most maps describe the imagined route, the path management believes people take, or wishes they would take, or agreed in a meeting they would take. They rarely describe the desire path, because the desire path is inconvenient, undocumented and often mildly against the rules. So the change programme rewires the imagined version. It paves the path nobody walks, a little wider and at real expense, and then puzzles over the grass wearing through again within the year.
I watched this pattern for thirty years in policing, long before anyone spoke of agentic enterprises. We would design a performance process from the top, a clean sequence of identify, collate, analyse, prioritise and act, with the metrics reporting neatly up the structure. It was coherent on paper. It carried almost no input from the officers doing the work at the front line, and so it measured the walk as imagined while the walk as done continued beside it, unrecorded and unmanaged. The gap did not close. It went quiet.
The error is to treat the desire path as indiscipline to be corrected. It is better read as evidence. People cross the grass for a reason, usually because the paved route was slower, made no sense, or asked for something the situation would not allow. The worn line shows where the real work travels and why. A leader who paves over it without asking the question rebuilds the same gap in costlier form. A leader who studies it first learns something no process map could show.
This is why I keep returning to Edgar Schein. Culture is rarely the values printed in the induction pack. It lives in what people do when no one is checking, in the assumptions that have worked often enough to turn invisible. Leadership identity is built the same way, from what a leader says, does, tolerates and rewards, and the desire path is the running tally of what has been tolerated. It records what the organisation values, whatever the strategy claims. Any change that ignores it, driven by technology or restructuring or a fresh set of words on the wall, alters the imagined organisation while the real one carries on undisturbed.
Closing the gap is a leadership act before it is a process one. It asks for the humility to watch the work as it is done rather than as it is reported, and to hold off from reaching for correction. It asks for honesty about why the desire path exists, which is rarely comfortable, since the answer implicates the design and sometimes the designer. Grint’s work on framing belongs here too. The leader’s task is to name the real work so that people recognise themselves in it, and the change describes their world rather than a tidier one. Bass would call the rest role modelling, care for the individual, and the willingness to stretch people towards something better. None of it holds if the starting point is a fiction.
The McKinsey authors reach the same lesson through the history of electrification. Factories bolted electric motors onto layouts built for steam and saw little return, until they redesigned the floor around what electricity could do. AI sits at a similar point. Fixed onto the imagined workflow, it will produce faster versions of work that never matched reality in the first place. The organisations moving ahead are the ones prepared to watch the walk as done, to ask why the desire path runs where it runs, and to redesign around the answer.
Change is hard because the map is never the territory, and the territory is worn smooth by the people who cross it. Watch where they walk. The real work, and the real culture, has been there all along.
Philip Knox
Leadership and organisational development consultant, PGK Consultancy Services Ltd.