Introducing Adaptable Organizations

What Boeing reveals about organizational drift, and why teams need the capacity to return.

May 27, 2026

Boeing is not an evil company. That was never their goal.

Boeing was founded in 1916 and became one of the most important aerospace companies in the world. It helped define aviation, defense, space, and the economy of the Seattle area for generations. At one point during World War II, Boeing employment in Washington topped 50,000 people, and the later “Boeing Bust” of the early 1970s was severe enough to depress the local economy.

They were not just making products.

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Boeing was part of a regional identity. It gave people work, shaped families, trained engineers, and, most importantly, built machines where precision, safety, and quality were not abstract ideals.

They were the work.

Even today, Boeing’s own language still points to that legacy. The company describes itself as a leading global aerospace company that develops, manufactures, and services commercial airplanes, defense products, and space systems for customers in more than 150 countries. It also places safety and quality at the center of its public messaging.

The problem was never that Boeing had ill intentions.

The problem was that what Boeing publicly shared as principles and values was not really reflected in its actions and decisions.

Two of the biggest incidents involving the company show that.

The 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019 killed 346 people and exposed serious questions about Boeing’s relationship with regulators, internal decision-making, and the way safety concerns were handled1.

Years later, in January 2024, an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-9 MAX lost a door plug in flight, causing rapid depressurization. The NTSB reported that the aircraft experienced an in-flight separation of the left mid exit door plug while climbing out of Portland, and the FAA responded by grounding 171 Boeing 737-9 MAX aircraft and saying it would increase oversight because of Boeing’s “systemic production-quality issues”2.

So if safety was a main concern for Boeing, how did these incidents happen?

You can have the mission and you can have the infrastructure, but you still need coherence from the place that matters the most: the people.

I don’t want to use these events just for shock value. What I want you to see is what they reveal about drift.

In the 737 MAX case, the public investigations did not point to one single bad person making one single bad decision. They pointed to a chain of decisions around design, certification, pilot training assumptions, regulatory oversight, and communication. The issue was not only technical. It was organizational.

Risk moved through the system without being stopped early enough. Decisions were made by people operating inside incentives, assumptions, deadlines, reporting structures, and institutional habits. The House Transportation Committee investigation focused directly on the certification process, transparency, accountability, and the relationship between Boeing and the FAA after the two fatal crashes. The FAA’s own return-to-service summary also described the MAX review as involving technical design changes, pilot training, and process lessons after the accidents.

The Alaska Airlines door-plug incident shows the same pattern more concretely. The public record points to missing bolts, undocumented work, insufficient training, weak guidance, rushed factory conditions, and oversight that failed to catch the problem before the aircraft entered service. The NTSB report and public summaries found that the door plug had been removed during factory work and the required bolts were not reinstalled. The work was not properly documented, and employees reported being rushed or underqualified.

That is what makes these incidents relevant to drift.

They were not produced by abstract forces; they were produced by human decisions.

The thing is, when an organization drifts, the systems meant to detect and regulate that drift can also drift. This is where the Boeing case becomes even more important.

The drift did not stop at Boeing’s walls. It also exposed weaknesses in the system meant to regulate Boeing.

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The FAA was supposed to act as an external feedback loop. Its role was to detect risk, challenge assumptions, and make sure the mission of safety remained stronger than the pressures of production, cost, and delivery3, but public reviews found weaknesses in FAA oversight too. Reports after the 737 MAX crashes raised concerns about certification and delegation. Later reviews of Boeing production found that FAA oversight processes for identifying and resolving production issues were not effective enough, and that oversight was still too reactive.

That matters because drift does not only happen inside the organization producing the harm. It can also happen inside the institutions meant to catch the drift.

So, how do we solve this problem?

I mean the problem of developing return capacity in an organization.

How does an organization return from drift when regulation and infrastructure can help, but the people inside the system still have to carry the direction?

That question is the reason I keep coming back to scale.

I’ve been pondering this for a while, and I’ve written about it a couple of times. I described my idea of drift and coherence being fractal, rooted in the theoretical framework I put together, Coherence Dynamics Theory, or CDT for short.

I had the idea of the problem, and I had a general, big-scale direction for the solution. Basically, if practicing return through discipline works at an individual level, then a similar practice must exist for organizations that experience drift at scale.

But I didn’t really have a public guideline that could share, in more detail, how I see that solution existing.

Adaptable Discipline works for individuals. But could a startup, as an organization, take those same precepts and translate them at the organizational level? Same with an institution like a non-profit or a government.

I think they could.

But in the process of doing that, some ideas would probably get lost in translation. Not because of lack of capacity, but because every organization, like every human system, incorporates flaws and biases that create drift. This means that drift could even corrupt the attempt to translate the principles behind Adaptable Discipline into something that applies to organizations.

So how do we solve that problem?

I’ve been talking a lot about agency. Maybe not explicitly, but through my reflections and documentation, I’ve been trying to introduce the idea of bottom-up agency: the notion that every one of us has the ability to impact the systems we belong to by developing our ability to self-govern.

Imagine a world where people could actually be trusted enough to make decisions aligned with the principles of the overarching collective.

It’s not too far-fetched.

Mission-aligned companies and non-profits in their early stages are often very close to this, but it usually doesn’t last for long. These organizations often do not have or build the necessary infrastructure to sustain the mission, and when they do, they often treat that infrastructure as if it could prevent drift in the first place.

Fractality proves to be useful here because, if we scale down, we have the same problem at an individual level:

What happens when we have the infrastructure, and the habits, but for one reason or another we break the streak?

Many people would say, well, if you were really disciplined, you wouldn’t break the streak.

Wrong.

We are all fallible. It’s part of being human. And because we are human, we are bound to drift, habits and everything.

The same is true for organizations. You can have infrastructure and all, but because an organization is a collective made by humans, it possesses the same flaws its members possess.

So organizations are bound to drift because they depend on humans.

They depend on behavior.

What infrastructure does, then, is mitigate and reduce the risk and depth of drift, but it cannot prevent it in its totality. I know this will sound somewhat dumb, but whatever: think of structure as a bulletproof jacket. It might not let the bullets get in, but damn, it will hurt. And if you keep using the same damaged bulletproof jacket, one day it won’t work anymore.

We saw it in the case of Boeing. They had the infrastructure and the mission, and yet drift did what drift does.

For organizations, just like for individuals, the solution is to build the ability to return to what matters. To engineer the conditions that make return possible when drift happens.

Here is where my latest work, and the one I’m launching today, is supposed to help.

Let me introduce you to Adaptable Organizations.

This is my attempt to translate the practice of return into organizational life.

Adaptable Organizations is a framework for building organizational return capacity: the ability of a team or institution to come back to coherence after drift, without requiring constant external correction.

The premise is simple.

Just like individuals, organizations experience drift.

While infrastructure matters, it won’t prevent drift. Building return capacity is what helps the company remain coherent along its lifecycle.

Adaptable Organizations is my answer to that.

This closes the circle I started with Adaptable Discipline.

Organizations are made of individuals.

Individuals drift, hence organizations drift too.

Because individuals drift, they can return too. Same with organizations.

Adaptable Discipline helps individuals engineer the conditions for their return.
Adaptable Organizations helps organizations engineer the conditions to develop return capacity.

By developing their ability to return, individuals develop bottom-up agency.
By developing their ability to return, organizations become more self-sufficient.

And organizations can’t become self-sufficient if their members haven’t developed bottom-up agency.

So, if you are a leader struggling because your team is doing too many unrelated things, or you are dealing with team conflict, high turnover, or a general sense that people are moving in different directions, consider this an opportunity to look at a different way to build alignment.

Take a look. See if you like the idea. It’s free for you to try out.

If you want or need additional help, I’d be happy to work with you to sort things out.

This week there won’t be a paid companion, just because of the nature of this announcement. But you have my commitment that next week we will have a new reflection and its proper companion.

For now, play with Adaptable Organizations. If you have any questions, please reach out. I’ll be happy to help.

Have a wonderful week!