Why your best employees quit after seeing the big picture
How process mapping exercises systematically drive away top talent
Four years of financial reports reduced to meaningless paperwork. A finance manager traces coloured strings across a wall-sized diagram of his organisation's operations, searching desperately for where his work connects to anything that matters. The arrows flow around him. His position floats in organisational space, tethered to nothing.
Two hours of increasingly frantic discussion with colleagues yields only confirmation: the reports that have consumed his professional life serve no operational purpose. They are bureaucratic artifacts produced for their own sake. The researcher documenting this process mapping exercise notes he appeared "on the verge of tears" as the implications crystallised.
This wasn't meant to be a career-ending revelation. The mapping exercise was designed to improve efficiency, not trigger existential crises. Yet something extraordinary was emerging across multiple Fortune 500 companies—a pattern that challenges fundamental assumptions about employee development and organisational loyalty.
The most capable professionals, when provided comprehensive knowledge of organisational operations, don't become more committed to their roles. They systematically abandon them. This isn't the expected outcome of employee development programmes—it's their unintended consequence.
When enlightenment becomes alienation
Ruthanne Huising's research tracked 48 managers and professionals through business process reengineering projects across five major corporations. These participants weren't struggling employees or organisational outsiders—project leaders deliberately selected established insiders with proven track records and deep institutional knowledge, the precise individuals organisations most want to retain and develop.
What happened next defied every assumption about the relationship between knowledge and commitment. Rather than returning to enhanced central roles as anticipated, 23 participants voluntarily moved to peripheral organisational change positions. They declined promotions, rejected lateral transfers, and abandoned comfortable career trajectories to become consultants, project managers, and change agents operating at the margins of corporate power.
Individual psychology or market dynamics might explain isolated cases. But the systematic nature of this exodus suggests something more fundamental: comprehensive organisational knowledge creates what Huising terms an "empowerment-alienation engine"—a mechanism that simultaneously enlightens employees about transformation possibilities whilst distancing them from their current roles.
Corporate archaeology reveals institutional fiction
The process maps these employees created transcended simple workflow diagrams. They became multimedia archaeological excavations of organisational reality—sprawling investigations covering entire conference room surfaces, employing coloured markers, adhesive notes, and connecting strings to trace how work, information, and decisions actually moved through their companies.
The discoveries systematically contradicted foundational assumptions about organisational design. Rather than encountering purposive structures coordinated by rational authority, participants unearthed what one described as "sediments of a history of voting, decree, conflict, agreement, compromise, bargaining, persuasion, coercion, and other forms of interaction." The metaphor captures something profound: organisations as geological formations built from layers of historical circumstance rather than architectural blueprints.
These revelations proved systematically disorienting. "Everything I see around here was developed because of specific issues that popped up, and it was all done ad hoc and added onto each other. It certainly wasn't engineered," reflected one team member. Another participant described his cognitive shift: "I was assuming that somebody did this on purpose, and it wasn't done on purpose; it was just a series of random events that somehow came together."
The most devastating moment occurred when a CEO, confronted with the actual map of his organisation's operations, sat down, placed his head on the table, and declared the situation "even more fucked up than I imagined." This wasn't merely an admission of operational problems—it revealed that senior leadership's understanding of their own organisation was largely fictitious.
The human glue phenomenon
The mapping process revealed a particularly disturbing pattern about middle management roles. Participants discovered they often functioned as "intervention resources"—human compensation systems for fundamental design failures. Their positions existed not to create value, but to make dysfunctional processes barely operational through continuous personal intervention.
One manager described the psychological impact of this recognition: "You really start understanding all of the waste and all of the redundancy and all of the people who are employed as what I call intervention resources. The process doesn't work, so you have to bone it up by putting people in to intervene in the process to hold it together. So it is like glue. So I would look around [the company] and I would see all these walking glue sticks, and it was just absolutely depressing and frustrating at the same time."
This metaphor—walking glue sticks—captures something profound about modern organisational life. Intelligent professionals spending careers holding together systems that shouldn't require constant human intervention to function. The realisation created a peculiar form of enlightened misery: understanding exactly how one's competence was being deployed to perpetuate incompetence.
Another participant confronted his own role in creating dysfunction: "I was responsible for so much of what was screwed up on that wall. I created it. I had made my little piece of the world better, but when I looked at it from the big picture... I had spent my entire 10 years in that part of the business, and it was pretty ugly, and I was responsible for a whole bunch of that."
This transcended traditional workplace alienation—the classic powerlessness where employees lack control over their work. Instead, participants experienced informed dissatisfaction with their complicity in ineffective systems. They could see not just what was broken, but how their well-intentioned optimisations had often amplified systemic problems elsewhere.
The empowerment trap
Paradoxically, the same knowledge that alienated employees from their current roles empowered them to envision radical alternatives. Understanding that organisational structures were continuously produced through social interaction, rather than fixed by external constraints, opened dramatic possibilities for redesign.
As one participant explained: "When you do all the discovery and diagnosis and you go do that redesign and you go, 'geez, this could really work,' it's hard to let go of that." Another described the transformation in his relationship with organisational boundaries: "They said, 'Well, you can't.' I said, 'Why can't we?... We can do anything we want. We made it up. We'll make it up some more.'"
The empowerment wasn't abstract—it was grounded in detailed understanding of how work actually flowed through their organisations. They could see specific inefficiencies, trace the sources of problems, and envision comprehensive solutions. But implementing these solutions from central roles constrained by existing structures seemed impossible.
The peripheral solution
This created a rational calculation that defied conventional career logic. If comprehensive change required system-level perspective, and central roles were constrained by existing structures, then peripheral positions offered better platforms for meaningful transformation.
Employees who moved to organisational change roles weren't escaping failure—they were pursuing effectiveness through different means. As one explained: "Maybe some of the concepts are fairly simple but... if we can get everybody focused on that, we can start to ignore the functional boundaries a little bit, and that's where it got fun, and that's where it got challenging."
Another described his motivation: "I live for the days that people tell me, 'well, you can't do that.'... I can." These weren't expressions of frustration with authority, but confidence in their ability to create better systems once freed from roles that required them to perpetuate dysfunction.
The voluntary movement to peripheral positions allowed these employees to retain their organisational knowledge and relationships while gaining freedom to pursue system-wide change. Rather than working within constraints they now understood to be arbitrary, they could work to redesign the constraints themselves.
The broader implications
Huising's research reveals a profound challenge for organisational transparency and employee development. The conventional wisdom assumes that more knowledge about organisational operations will increase employee engagement and retention. But there appears to be a knowledge saturation point beyond which transparency becomes counterproductive for keeping capable employees in central roles.
This has implications far beyond business process reengineering. Any initiative that provides comprehensive organisational knowledge to capable employees—consulting engagements, cross-functional projects, leadership development programs, or transparency initiatives—may inadvertently create the conditions for informed self-peripheralisation.
The phenomenon also suggests why organisational change efforts often struggle despite impressive local improvements. Companies routinely achieve dramatic metrics—34% cost reductions, 44% time savings, 25% quality improvements—yet business-unit costs increase and profits decline. The problem may not be inadequate local change, but the systematic departure of employees capable of coordinating system-wide transformation.
The knowledge curse
The research points to what might be called the "knowledge curse" of modern organisations. In an economy increasingly dependent on knowledge work, providing employees with comprehensive understanding of operations becomes essential for innovation and adaptation. Yet this same knowledge may alienate the most capable employees from working within existing structures.
The curse operates through a cruel logic: the employees most capable of understanding system-wide dysfunction are also most capable of creating alternatives. Once they recognise the gap between organisational rhetoric about efficiency and the reality of widespread waste and poor coordination, returning to roles that perpetuate these problems becomes psychologically difficult.
As one participant reflected: "I could have stayed, but there were so many things that we discovered, I personally discovered, and the team discovered, during our process journey that I could not get back into the mould of status quo and small incremental improvement and don't rock the boat and don't make waves, just plug away and check the boxes as you go."
The unplanned exodus
The most disturbing aspect of this pattern is its invisibility to organisational leadership. Senior managers design development experiences to enhance employee capabilities and commitment, not to trigger voluntary departures to peripheral roles. The loss of institutional knowledge and change capacity often becomes apparent only after these employees have redirected their expertise toward system-wide transformation from outside traditional power structures.
The employees themselves often experience their choices as compelled rather than voluntary. As one explained: "If I'd have known how hard it would have been, I would have never started; now that I've started, I'd never go back." Another described feeling: "I don't feel like I have much of a choice."
This suggests that comprehensive organisational knowledge creates irreversible cognitive changes. Once employees grasp the constructed nature of organisational arrangements and recognise their potential to create superior alternatives, working within existing constraints may become genuinely intolerable rather than merely frustrating.
Huising's research illuminates a fundamental tension in knowledge economies. The comprehensive understanding essential for innovation and adaptation simultaneously enables recognition that current arrangements are inadequate. For the most capable employees, this recognition doesn't produce resignation or cynical acceptance—it generates systematic efforts to create alternatives from positions where such creation becomes possible.
The implications extend far beyond corporate development programmes. Every initiative providing comprehensive organisational knowledge to capable employees—consulting engagements, cross-functional projects, leadership rotations, transparency initiatives—may inadvertently create conditions for informed self-peripheralisation. The very transparency that modern organisations need to adapt and compete may systematically alienate those most capable of leading adaptation.
This represents more than an unfortunate side effect of organisational development—it reveals a structural contradiction in knowledge work. The same understanding that makes employees valuable also makes them aware of how their value is being squandered. The knowledge that empowers recognition of possibilities also empowers rejection of current realities.