On PID Controllers, Moka Pots and Leadership: A reflection on systemic drift, organisational exhaustion and how we might course-correct

One of my preferred ways to switch off from work is to explore and learn. Whether that is learning to play the Pokémon TCG with my 9-year-old son, Norwegian with a green owl as my guide, or most recently all about coffee thanks to James Hoffmann on YouTube.

It’s courtesy of the latter and his explanation of adjusting temperature, pressure and coffee grind size in a moka pot using a PID controller that brings you this latest reflection on systems dynamic leadership.

Now, I am not an engineer and won’t be able to explain the formulae behind a PID controller, but somewhere between water temperature regulation and a passionate explanation about extraction consistency, I found myself thinking about the parallels with organisational leadership, especially that within charities trying to navigate the current difficult and changing environment they find themselves in.

But if you’re sitting there wondering what on earth PID is or stands for, let me try to explain (in very basic terms and again, please don’t ask me about the maths behind it).

A PID controller is essentially a system that helps regulate and course-correct.

The “P” stands for proportional – responding to what is happening right now.

The “I” stands for integral – taking into account what has been building up over time.

And the “D” stands for derivative – anticipating where things are heading next.

In simple terms: it helps a system adjust continuously rather than wildly overheating, overcorrecting or drifting completely off course.

Doesn’t that sound exactly like organisational leadership?

So, let’s refill our coffee and follow me on a journey of organisational drift, systemic drag, integral blindness and psychodynamic potential. It’s going to be wild (or, you know, aromatic, rich with citrus notes…).

Organisational drift

Every organisation usually has some kind of compass. Its mission, purpose, vision for impact and maybe even a theory or story of change acting like a map to align action with purpose.

I am a big fan of a good theory or story of change and if used right it is a fantastic tool. But let’s park this for now, because this is not about ToC’s, it’s about PID’s.

One thing they do have in common though is that both, within an organisational context, require a fair amount of thinking and reflection.

Whatever the organisational mission or purpose, there comes a point when the environment requires a response. Ensuring we are responding rather than reacting is where a PID framework may be helpful.

Let’s consider some immediate, medium and long-term challenges organisations, especially smaller charities, face: There’s changes to funding streams, a shift in funder priorities, needs within the system change, all at varying speeds and correlations.

Sometimes organisations stretch a little to keep bridging that widening gap until they are doing an artful split that is quite painful and translates into a system perpetuating a way of working that practically devalues its core asset: staff. This shows up in staff sickness, burnout, grievances, stress and at worst unsafe practice.

Like the manager who leaves and takes with them the password to a spreadsheet apparently essential to the functioning of three services and half the building. (Or worse, who didn’t even have a spreadsheet and kept everything in their head!)

Organisations and people drift because conditions change. Processes aren’t updated, followed or implemented because the strain is felt too acutely.

The issue is not the drift itself. Drift is inevitable. The question is whether the organisation notices it early enough, understands what it means and adjusts without completely destabilising the people and systems inside it.

Because if an organisation does not course-correct, or course-correct effectively, it eventually starts lurching or worse collapsing.

And this is where the PID idea really started to percolate for me (see what I did there?).

P: Proportional responses and the danger of reacting to visible pain

One of the things I have been thinking about most is the difference between what I am calling surface deficit and systemic drag.

Surface deficit is the visible problem organisational systems activate themselves around – and activate is a good word.

These are the symptoms that mobilise action plans, emergency meetings and RAG rated risk registers that are monitored weekly. It shows up in the overspend that makes the Head of Finance look like they’ve had five espressos in a row.
The missed KPI that makes the contract manager look like their cappuccino was made with sour milk. It’s the often-impulsive reactivity to a commissioner complaint, a staffing gap, growing safeguarding concerns or a drop in engagement.

Don’t get me wrong, these things absolutely need attention and action. But they are often only the visible symptom the system reacts to proportionally.

And without a clear framework that aligns action or reaction with reflection and planning that proportional reaction can quickly become overreaction.

One of the most interesting parallels with PID systems is what happens when organisations struggle to tolerate uncertainty - and let’s face it, there is currently a lot of uncertainty around.

Instead of sitting with emerging discomfort and understanding what it means, many systems convert anxiety into action. Rapid redundancies when the projected deficit grows to unsustainable levels, three simultaneous task and finish groups, a new transformation programme and additional reporting templates being layered on top of wellbeing initiatives introduced to teams already working eleven-hour days.

Activity increases, but clarity, focus and impact do not.

Some organisations turn their strategy into a stress response with a calendar invite.

And to be clear, this is not because leaders are uncaring or incompetent. Everyone I know in leadership roles cares deeply. Sometimes too deeply.

But organisations under pressure often seek short-term anxiety reduction rather than genuine system correction.

Like taking the moka pot off the stove too early because the sound suddenly got louder and made you panic.

The coffee might stop overflowing everywhere, but it also won’t actually be finished brewing.

Or vice versa, the pot is spluttering and trying to take it off the stove we have a brand-new blister and coffee everywhere.

I: Integral blindness and the weight that organisations stop seeing

This is where the “I” in PID becomes important to me.

Over time everything becomes normalised, from exhaustion and overwork to poor boundaries, lack of accountability and masking capacity issues.

Often smaller charities are particularly vulnerable to this because the sector attracts people who care deeply and routinely go beyond what is sustainable.

They don’t just walk the extra mile; they run the extra marathon when we haven’t equipped them to do so (because we are not expecting them to).

Frontline staff often hold enormous emotional and relational investment in the work. They will compensate for failing systems for far longer than they should.

From the outside, the organisation can appear stable precisely because people are overcompensating internally.

That is what I mean by systemic drag.

For me, systemic drag is the accumulated pressure sitting underneath the visible symptoms, which can stem from a variety of pressure points, such as years of underfunding, subsidising contracts because they align with the charitable purpose, weak accountability, dependency on goodwill,
avoiding emotionally difficult decisions  or relying on exceptional individuals to hold entire systems together.

And charities in particular are incredibly good at functioning while quietly deteriorating.

In fact, at some point every charity acquires at least one person who appears to run an entire operational area through sheer force of memory, emotional containment and a colour-coded spreadsheet nobody else is allowed to touch or can even understand.

These people become part operational lead, part historian, part nervous system.

They have survived four restructures, three CEOs, two “new strategic directions” and at least one attempt to introduce a CRM system that everyone pretended to understand but didn’t use well and has led to data inconsistency.

New staff regard them with the same mixture of respect and fear usually reserved for haunted Victorian dolls.

And while we laugh about it (because most of us will have met someone like this), these dynamics matter.

Because eventually organisations stop functioning strategically and start functioning in survival mode.

I think this is one of the reasons restructures often feel shocking to frontline staff.

Leadership may be responding not just to the current financial picture or operational issue, but to years of accumulated systemic drift, which can feel disconnected and disproportionate.

Which means frontline teams are often thinking: “But we’ve been holding this together for years.”

And they have, which is exactly the point.

D: Derivative thinking and the fear of what comes next

The “D” in PID stands for derivative – anticipating where things are heading next.

Realistically this is the part many organisations struggle with most. Because while we can anticipate, the future is not written.

Derivative thinking requires tolerating uncertainty and ambiguity before there is full proof, full certainty or full crisis.

It means recognising trajectory and making assumptions as to where current patterns are likely to lead if nothing changes.

That is uncomfortable. I want to know that if I put the water in the pot, the coffee in the basket and the moka pot on the stove that I will have a delicious coffee, not an over extracted, bitter potion that isn’t fit for drinking. But if I’m outside brewing on a camp stove there are variables that impact my success if I get them wrong.

It therefore means asking and sitting with all the variables around the ‘what if’. It means asking what happens if funding reduces again next year, if the exceptional manager everyone depends on leaves, or if the team that has been “just coping” suddenly tips into burnout, grievance or sickness absence. And what happens if we don’t do the small corrections now?

Large corrections happen when uncertainty has already become an unsustainable reality or turned into existential crisis.

I think many organisations delay derivative thinking because emotionally it is easier to stay focused on the immediate issue in front of us than confront where the current trajectory may be heading.

Derivative thinking is emotionally difficult because it requires organisations to confront uncomfortable possibilities before crisis has fully arrived. It asks systems to act on trajectory rather than certainty, and many organisations understandably struggle with that.

Which is why the same problems often keep resurfacing six months later wearing slightly different clothes.

Hero roles and the fantasy of rescue

Another thing organisations do under pressure is locate solutions in roles or people and sometimes both at once.

The organisation is trying to solve systemic problems by creating a safeguarding lead, a transformation manager, a wellbeing officer, a culture lead, or a new director without each role having sufficient authority and influence to change the system.

While these roles can absolutely add value, organisations sometimes unconsciously start treating them as containers for the systemic problems they were brought in to shift.

Without a functioning safeguarding culture, if safeguarding sits with the safeguarding lead, the wider organisation does not have to fully confront its safeguarding culture. Silent withdrawal and disengagement hamper every effort of collaboration.

If wellbeing sits with HR, managers do not have to examine the conditions exhausting their teams or take accountable action to improve these conditions. They flag, raise and get frustrated that nothing changes.

If fundraising sits with one savvy individual, the organisation does not have to ask harder questions about sustainability, strategy or delivery.

The hero role becomes a defence against systemic responsibility. The burden on the new lead or director is huge, and if they don’t feel able to fully lean into the authority their role brings or are withheld the authority from below they are set up to fail.

And over time that creates resentment, disengagement and at worst an abdication of collective responsibility altogether.

In psychodynamic terms, organisations often split off anxiety and locate it somewhere manageable, such as a person, a team, a role, or a “problem service.”

If we can locate the problem there, perhaps the rest of the system does not have to confront itself.

Reassurance, assurance and what is not seen

What then does all of this mean for boards and strategic leadership?

Under pressure, organisations and their leadership may unconsciously seek reassurance rather than assurance.

Reassurance asks: “Are things okay right now?” while assurance asks: “Are we sustainable? What corrections are we avoiding now that may later require a much more painful one?” It’s a shift from inspecting the moka pot for functionality to inspecting the entire brewing set up.

That is a very different kind of conversation.

And I think many boards are trying to govern organisations through periods of enormous complexity while often only seeing fragments of the emotional and operational reality underneath the surface.

PID and adaptive organisations

Now obviously a PID controller is based on a scientific, calculable system while leadership is messier, more relational and in some ways less predictable.

Or in the example of my moka pot: leadership still has to brew the coffee by hand.

We might have fancy equipment, thermometers, expensive grinders and elaborate dashboards, but ultimately, we still have to stand by the stove, listen carefully, gauge temperature, watch for drift and take the pot off the heat at roughly the right moment.

There is no fully automated setting for leadership.

But the more I think about PID systems and how the concept can be used as an organisational framework, the more I think leadership itself has to be about developing the reflective capacity to notice drift early, understand what has been building over time and respond proportionately before systems start lurching from one crisis to the next.

Leadership needs the reflective space that enables learning how to correct honestly, collectively and early enough that the organisation does not burn out the people trying hardest to keep it functioning.

In the next article I’ll explore what a PID-informed organisation might look like in practice and how leadership teams can build systems that sense, interpret and respond to drift without collapsing into perpetual firefighting, change fatigue or hero dependency. And yes, I will keep the coffee metaphor brewing alongside it.