On PID Controllers, Moka Pots and Leadership Part 2: The Reflective Organisation: Understanding What Has Been Building Beneath the Surface

From reactive to reflective: Building a PID-informed leadership framework

In the first article of this series, I explored the parallels between PID controllers, moka pots and organisational leadership. We wandered through organisational drift, systemic drag, proportional overreaction and the strange phenomenon of charities quietly functioning while internally held together by caffeine, goodwill and systems reliant on individuals landing in hero roles without sufficient agency for change.

This second article moves further into the “I” within PID: the integral element that allows organisations not just to react, but to reflect. The ability to step back and understand not just what is happening now, but what has been building over time and what that means for the wider organisational system.

Because one of the things I keep returning to is that most organisations are not short of action.

They are short of meaningful, effective and sustainable reflective spaces.

Or to keep going with my coffee analogy: there’s a lot of highly caffeinated instant coffee knocking about but no time to spend sitting down and watching, smelling and savouring a four-minute brew. Which means we’re losing out, individually and organisationally. (And if you’re not into coffee, personally I do think you’re already missing out.)

Reflective leadership is not slowing organisations down. It is helping them notice what their speed is preventing them from seeing.

From leadership model to systems map

There are well-established and excellent approaches around transformational leadership, systems thinking, adaptive leadership, trauma-informed practice, organisational psychology, governance and change management. Most leadership teams I know are not suffering from a lack of models. Most frameworks don’t necessarily stand in conflict with one another either. Each adds something and, just like speciality coffee, there is usually one more suited to a particular context, environment or need.

Thinking about PID controllers and adapting the concept into a systems dynamic framework is not trying to become the next branded methodology with a shiny logo and an expensive away day (although I am always happy to deliver those provided there’s good coffee), it’s a way of layering our thinking.

It simply offers a reflective map helping leadership teams think about where attention is being pulled, where pressure is building, what is being overlooked and how organisations can avoid confusing movement with meaningful correction.

Or in coffee terms: how to stop repeatedly turning the heat up and hoping for a better brew.

The triangle at the centre of the system

The idea of the PID framework is built around interconnectivity. A triangular relationship between the proportional, integral and derivative all coming into play around the centre defined by the organisational mission, impact model or theory of change. The “why” behind the work. The organisational compass.

The three interacting elements of PID continuously influence one another and require simultaneous awareness.

The proportional point of the triangle focuses on current reality. What is happening right now. The visible pressure points. Financial concerns, operational issues, safeguarding alerts, staffing gaps, service delivery concerns, performance measures and all the things that generate immediate organisational attention.

The integral point of the triangle focuses on accumulated reality. What has been building over time. The patterns underneath the immediate symptoms. What is it that has led to staff exhaustion or cultural drift? What are the historical tensions that turn into repeated operational friction? Why do we see emotional avoidance? It’s everything the system has gradually stopped noticing because these patterns, behaviours and feedback loops have become normalised.

And the derivative point of the triangle focuses on emerging reality. Where things may be heading next. Sustainability. Trajectory. Risk. Future workforce pressures. External changes. The uncomfortable “what if” questions organisations often avoid until circumstances force them into the open.

The framework only works when all three remain in interaction.

Too much proportional focus can lead to organisations becoming reactive and frantic, while too much integral focus means systems can become reflective but paralysed. Too much derivative focus and leadership risks becoming strategically impressive or visionary but disconnected from the lived reality of the people inside the system.

Good leadership requires movement across all three and much like brewing good coffee, timing matters.

The problem with reactive systems

One of the reasons I think smaller charities in particular may find this way of thinking useful is because many are operating under relentless pressure.

There is rarely enough money, rarely enough time, rarely enough staff and often an overwhelming amount of emotional demand.

Under those conditions, organisations understandably become highly proportional.

Everything is an urgent problem that is being solved with resources immediately available. People might be in a business support role, but that’s only a fraction away from a management role, right? They can do a bit of people management or stepping up. It’s only temporary.

And this is where I think organisations can quietly get themselves into trouble, because temporary solutions have a tendency to become organisational culture.

The workaround becomes the undocumented process. Eventually nobody remembers whether the process was ever designed this way in the first place. The overstretched manager becomes the operating model.
The “just for now” that becomes “the way we do things here.” Or even worse “it can’t change!”

The system focuses on whatever hurts most right now, the immediate deficit or concern, which simply cannot be ignored.

But if leadership teams remain trapped only in proportional reality, the organisation slowly loses its reflective and anticipatory capacity. The temporary solution becomes a way of working. Boundaries become too flexible and porous leading to a system where no one feels safe, contained, functional or clear about the task at hand.

The system becomes operationally busy but strategically and emotionally short-sighted.

Or in moka pot terms: the heat gets turned up higher and higher while nobody notices the coffee is already burning.

Reflection as organisational practice

This is where I think the integral part of the PID framework becomes incredibly important, because reflective organisations are not merely organisations that think a lot.

They are organisations that intentionally create space to understand patterns, relationships, pressures and accumulated drift before those things turn into crises.

This requires more than supervision once a month and a wellbeing initiative during Stress Awareness Week.

It requires leadership teams to actively examine how the system is functioning and proactively create not just spaces, but an expectation of reflective practice at every level of functioning.

As leaders we have a responsibility to enable our teams to think, question, learn and for us to listen, reflect back, think and integrate in turn.

We need to know and understand where and why people are invisibly compensating and what has become culturally normalised.

As leaders it is our responsibility to articulate, model and drive the culture we want to thrive.

We need to decide if we’re going for instant, filter or cafetiere coffee and what that means.

This is where I believe psychodynamic thinking becomes particularly useful, because organisations, much like people, develop defences.

And organisational defences often initially work, which is exactly why they persist.

We see that over-functioning protects services temporarily or that hero roles reduce anxiety temporarily. Essentially avoidance preserves stability for a while and reactive proportionality creates the illusion of control.

Defenses within a system can be difficult to spot because they are held and played out by individuals, relationships and practices. It is conceptually easier to label people and practices than to acknowledge, understand and change organisational defenses that are designed to ensure nothing gets destabilised further.

But eventually those same defenses start creating the very instability they were originally trying to prevent.

It usually just delays the correction until the eventual adjustment becomes far more painful. It avoids meaningful change under the guise of proportional adjustment.

The leadership triangle in practice

Leaders orient themselves differently within organisational systems and in broad strokes these patterns can be mapped through a PID lense.

We’ve probably all worked with leaders who can spot a crisis before anyone else in the room has even finished opening the agenda. The leaders who immediately move into action mode, solve operational problems quickly and somehow hold twelve competing pressures in their head before 9am. They naturally orient towards the proportional. Operationally sharp, highly responsive and often very good in crisis.

Others naturally orient more towards the integral. They notice culture, patterns, historical tension and emotional dynamics. They often understand why the same issues keep resurfacing and why apparently simple operational problems are rarely simple at all.

Others lean more towards the derivative. They think strategically, anticipate risk, notice future drift and ask difficult questions about sustainability and trajectory before the rest of the system is emotionally ready to confront them.

None of these positions are inherently better than the others.

The difficulty comes when organisations become trapped predominantly in one corner of the triangle.

A highly proportional leadership culture may become reactive and exhausted, while a highly integral culture may become reflective but indecisive. A highly derivative culture may become strategically impressive or visionary but disconnected from operational reality.

A healthy executive leadership team moves consciously and dynamically between all three positions.

In practice that might mean giving ourselves a moment to pause and ask whether our immediate proportional response to a crisis is actually that, or whether it may become ineffective or even detrimental when taking into account the potential derivatives.

In financially challenging circumstances reaching a crisis point might mean an organisation wanting to reduce overheads by buying cheaper coffee, reducing the training budget and eliminating consultancy costs instead of looking at restructuring. In so doing they might find themselves in a position six months later needing to make reactive redundancies without having a forward-looking structure in place.

Beyond the organisational hero role

One of the things this framework has helped me think about differently is organisational dependency on exceptional individuals.

In the first article I wrote about organisational hero roles. The safeguarding lead role expected to carry organisational safeguarding culture. The wellbeing lead role expected to solve staff burnout. The interim leader brought in to “fix” systemic dysfunction within six months and two restructures.

It’s something I’ve often noticed both as an interim leader and working alongside other leaders as part of my practice. I think the PID framework lense allows leadership teams to position questions differently: Is the organisation trying to outsource systemic responsibility into a role or is there a collective, systemic way to address this problem?

Are we firefighting and seeking a proportional response to the current issue or are we positioning ourselves to become stronger, more resilient and more sustainable?

Is everyone genuinely set up to succeed?

Because sustainable systems cannot rely indefinitely on exceptional compensation, eventually people leave.

When they do, organisations often suddenly realise the system was never stable in the first place, leading them straight back into the same doom loop of crisis management they were trying to escape.

PID as reflective leadership practice

The more I sit with this framework, the more I see it as a reflective practice tool that can provide a good way of asking the right questions at the right time.

I see it as an emerging way of helping organisations and leadership teams ask:
What are we reacting to?
What is it that we are carrying as an organisation?
What are we moving towards?

Or perhaps more importantly:

What are we no longer seeing clearly because we have adapted to it?
What is the worst that could happen that we are too anxious to look at?

That, for me, is where the idea of a structured PID framework becomes useful.

It’s not a solution but an invitation to slow leadership thinking down enough to distinguish between surface deficit and systemic drag.

To pause before turning the stove up higher or to notice whether the pressure building inside the moka pot is actually telling us something important about the whole brewing process.

Let’s not question whether we are under pressure or not or what we need to do to cope with the pressure as an organisation. Maybe the more important question is which part of the triangle currently dominates the system and what is that doing to the pressure we are trying to alleviate.

Are we reacting proportionally to visible pain while ignoring accumulated drift?

Are we endlessly reflecting without making difficult corrections?

Or are we so focused on future sustainability that we have lost touch with the emotional, mental and operational reality of the people currently holding the work together?

Organisations rarely destabilise because one thing goes wrong, often there’s a perfect storm that has made attempts at course correction ineffective or at worst futile.

Organisations destabilise when the relationship between proportional, integral and derivative thinking collapses.

In the third and final article in this series, I’ll look at how organisations can use this framework practically to build adaptive roadmaps for change, restructuring and long-term sustainability without collapsing into perpetual firefighting or change fatigue.