The operating system: the one nobody sees

This is article 1 of 3 in the Operating System series.

A conversation that reframed decades in the boardroom

I have sat in a lot of boardrooms. I have restructured companies, cut budgets, signed layoff orders, and closed deals that made other people rich. Thirty years of it, across more than sixty acquisitions and dispositions. I thought I understood how business worked.

Then I sat down with Simon Mont, an organizational strategist who has spent over a decade studying how humans build the structures we work inside of. Not long into our conversation, he said something that reframed everything I thought I knew.

He said the world we see, all of it, the good and the broken, is a manifestation of how we collaborate. Not a mystery. Not fate. A choice, made collectively, over and over, mostly without anyone noticing they were making it.

What an operating system actually is

Simon uses a simple image. Your computer runs on an operating system. It decides what is possible and what is not. You can install any app you want, but the operating system sets the outer limits.

Human systems work the same way. A business has an operating system. So does a family. So does a nation. It is made of the rules, spoken and unspoken, that decide who has power, what gets rewarded, and what nobody questions.

Most of us never see it. We treat the operating system as reality itself, not as a choice someone made a long time ago that we inherited without a vote.

The nation you live in did not have to look this way

Here is where it gets uncomfortable. Simon points out that even the idea of a nation-state, with its laws, borders, and governments, is part of an operating system. It feels permanent. It is not. It is one model among many that humans have built, and it could have been built differently.

This is Simon's reading of history, not a settled fact everyone agrees on. He traces a line from monarchy, where one person held total power, through feudalism, and through the earliest trading corporations like the Dutch East India Company. From there, he traces it into the shareholder-first model that dominates business today. Other people trace that same history differently. I am including his version because it helped me see my own career in a new light, not because I am asking you to accept it as the only true account.

Why fixing symptoms keeps producing the same disease

If you keep using the same operating system, Simon says, you will keep getting similar outcomes, no matter how hard you work at the surface level.

I have lived this. I have watched companies hire a new head of sustainability, launch a values statement, and redesign the org chart. Almost nothing changed about what the business actually did, or who it actually served. The operating system underneath stayed the same. So too did the results.

Someone reportedly once said that insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. Nobody seems entirely sure who said it first. But the point holds. Rearranging furniture is not the same as changing the house.

The one place you can actually put your hands on it

Here is where Simon's thinking became genuinely useful to me, rather than just interesting.

Try to change the entire global economic system, and most of us stall out immediately. It is too big. Nobody knows where to start. Change yourself, and the impact stays private, contained to your own life.

Simon focuses on the layer in between: the organization. A business is small enough to actually touch. It has a hundred people, or ten, or ten thousand. Each one carries their own version of the operating system inside their head, and each one shapes, and is shaped by, the structure they work inside.

Change that structure, and two things happen. It cascades down, because people adapt to whatever environment they are given. And it cascades out, because the organization starts generating different impacts in the world, and those impacts start to shift the systems around it.

This is why I spent thirty years inside organizations rather than writing position papers about them. It is the layer where change is actually possible to execute, not just possible to imagine.

How the system replicates itself, from your head to your org chart

Simon's example is a top-down company with a single CEO, a C-suite, and layers of managers below them. Everyone managed by someone else slowly learns the limits of their own power. They learn they are subject to the decisions of people above them. So they climb, trying to get some of that power for themselves.

Along the way, they build an identity around their role. I am a manager. This is what a good manager does. They go home and measure their day by how well they performed that identity. The operating system has moved from the org chart into their sense of self, without anyone deciding that should happen.

Change the structure, and this shifts too. Give people real accountability and real decision-making power, and their self-image changes with it. Simon puts it plainly: change begins from within, and change also begins outside, when you build people a different environment to adapt to.

The play you didn't audition for

Near the end of our conversation, Simon offered an image that has stayed with me since. He said most of us are playing characters in a story someone else wrote, and we have convinced ourselves it is the story we actually wanted.

He used online marketplace sellers as the example. Individual sellers hustle inside their own small storefronts, feel some sense of success, earn some money, and measure themselves against the seller next door. Meanwhile, a very small group at the top is extracting the real value from the whole system. Most participants never clock that they are playing a supporting role in someone else's script.

I recognized myself in that description. Thirty years of climbing, closing, and winning, inside rules I never once questioned because I assumed they were how businesses all over worked.

Where this leaves us

None of this means burn the system down tomorrow. Simon is candid about that too. Confronting change at a global scale is intimidating enough that most of us stall before we even start.

What it means is smaller and more useful. Look at the operating system running underneath your own organization before you try to fix what it is producing. The layoffs, the burnout, the values statement nobody believes, the sustainability initiative that never moves past the press release. These are symptoms. The operating system is the disease.

The next piece in this series looks at what happens when good people try to change that operating system and reach for the wrong tool, or only half a toolkit.

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