No, the system isn't toxic

Rejecting convenient workplace myths

A large part of my LinkedIn feed over the last 5 years is toxic workplace and systems posts. This includes bullying, toxic leaders and workplaces, and my contribution of scapegoating. The same ideas are recycled between influencers and commenters, and the commentary treats these patterns as if they’re new, unexpected, awful (understandably), and something that should be stopped or fixed. Of course, I was on the toxic workplace bandwagon and contributed to this discourse over the years with plenty of posts condemning systems and leaders for being toxic.

The increased frequency of these posts, and the LinkedIn influencer-experts who speak about workplace inclusion, safety, psychological safety, wellness, attunement and leadership as things that will improve workplaces, and who champion changing culture into psychologically safe ones, point to a shared assumption that workplaces can be designed to be toxic-free and be made to function in a particular way if the right interventions are applied.

This entire discourse assumes workplaces are meant to function according to their stated values and have somehow gone off track, which is the wrong assumption to make. Workplaces function as designed. When a person realises this can feel like betrayal, because it means confronting the possibility that the institution they trusted was never governed by the rules it claimed to uphold. What people experience as toxicity is often the result of encountering that design while still believing the myth.

An entire field of complexity science has developed to describe how systems behave. In organisational life, its language has been smuggled into workplace thinking, where complexity is often framed as something to manage and improve. That language now shapes fields such as leadership, organisational psychology, and wellbeing, all of which promise better functioning workplaces.

These fields are positioned as helping people navigate the world of work while helping organisations improve. Many people turn to these frameworks in good faith, trying to make sense of experiences that feel confusing and deeply unsettling. In practice, they also function as mechanisms of assimilation. They help people adapt to existing conditions, make sense of their experience, and continue operating within environments that aren’t structured around the assumptions those same frameworks promote. Even the wellbeing science feeding many of these interventions remains unsettled on the basic question of how wellbeing itself should be defined.

This framework emerged from repeated observation of the same distortions across very different late-stage systems (ie. academia, large corporations, hospital systems, government departments), rather than reading up on political theory. I’ve always been suspicious of tidy explanations for complex environments when my observations keep showing otherwise. The patterns become visible when you spend enough time inside environments where stated values and actual behaviour diverge and where people try to make sense of contradictions that official narratives can’t explain. I’ve encountered fragments of similar thinking in the work of various writers, including on Substack, but this model is grounded in pattern recognition rather than scholarship. Its value lies in whether it explains what people are actually experiencing.

Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash

The stories we tell ourselves about work

These myths only make sense if you assume the workplace is meant to function according to its stated values. These distortions survive because most people make sense of workplaces through a small set of familiar myths, each one offering a comforting explanation for why things seem wrong. Most people hold onto these narratives for understandable reasons. Letting them go can mean facing the painful possibility that the institution they trusted was never operating by the rules they believed in.

First is the idealised workplace narrative, the corporate Garden of Eden. Work is supposed to be psychologically safe, inclusive, fair, accountable. Good people speak openly, competence is valued, and reasonable behaviour is rewarded. In this fantasy, politics barely exists. If the culture is healthy enough, merit rises to the top and the workplace behaves exactly as the leadership brochure promised.

Then comes the toxicity narrative, which treats every unpleasant workplace as a fallen version of that paradise. Toxic leaders, broken cultures, poor communication, unsafe environments, absent accountability are all signs that something pure has been corrupted. Politics is treated as contamination as though power plays are a foreign substance that somehow leaked into an otherwise pure workplace and spoiled the atmosphere.

The intervention narrative is the optimism industry built on top of that diagnosis. If only we had more attuned leaders, stronger feedback loops, more inclusion, more training, more frameworks, and one more workshop involving coloured markers and breakout groups, the workplace could finally be restored to health. Politics, in this version, is a removable defect, a design flaw awaiting the right consultant to engineer it away.

There’s the intrusion narrative, beloved by those convinced politics arrived from outside in muddy boots. In this version, workplaces were once meritocratic, rational, and performance-driven, until equity agendas, DEIB language, identity claims, and social causes stormed in and ruined the purity of the enterprise. Politics is framed as an alien intrusion as though the workplace had always been an orderly meritocracy.

Finally comes the power pathology narrative, where politics is blamed on the usual suspects: narcissists, favourites, empire-builders, protected actors, bad incentives, and the wrong personalities in charge. The workplace itself is presumed fundamentally sound. The problem, apparently, is that it has been temporarily hijacked by the wrong cast of characters.

These narratives compete, overlap, and borrow from one another, but they all depend on the same comforting premise that workplaces are supposed to operate according to the ideal, and that politics appears only when something has gone wrong.

What they can’t entertain is the possibility that nothing has gone wrong at all.

Toxic… or just incompatible?

Toxic workplace has become the catch-all diagnosis for the moment a person discovers that the rules they thought governed an organisation are not the rules actually in play.

The experience on the inside seems so real. The place appears hostile and political, and colleagues seem manipulative, cliquish, evasive, self-protective — fluent in behaviour that wasn’t described in the onboarding handbook. The natural conclusion is that something has gone wrong for the workplace to be so dysfunctional and morally compromised.

The explanation is often less dramatic, though no less painful. Sometimes what is being experienced is the shock of discovering that the system is operating according to rules the person never knew they were expected to accept. They may no longer be compatible with the environment they are in, or may never have been, because they were working from assumptions the workplace itself does not actually honour.

That mismatch is profoundly disorienting because it feels like betrayal, and often it is. People assume they’re witnessing a deviation from normal workplace functioning when they might be encountering the workplace functioning exactly as it’s structured to function.

The word toxic then appears as a way of naming the shock of political misfit. For many people, it is the only language available for an experience that’s both violating and difficult to explain. This doesn’t make the experience imaginary but it can make the diagnosis wrong. Sometimes the workplace hasn’t gone bad at all and is revealing that its real operating logic is incompatible with what you can ethically or psychologically remain inside.

Why politics exists (and isn’t going anywhere)

By workplace politics, I don’t mean party politics, though some people insist on bringing that in too. I mean the ordinary daily business of influence, favour, positioning, and survival inside hierarchies where everyone pretends merit matters. Most people don’t enter workplaces intending to become political actors. They adapt gradually to the pressures, incentives, and unspoken rules that govern institutional life.

As workplaces grow, they become layered bureaucracies, with more managers arriving to manage other managers. Risk becomes sacred and the real boss as the institution becomes less interested in accuracy and accountability than in being protected. The larger the organisation, the more energy goes into shielding it from embarrassment and liability. Entire professional classes emerge whose main function is managing exposure while remaining far removed from the actual work.

Promotion follows the same logic as advancement goes to people who reflect the values the workplace wants mirrored back to itself, not necessarily to those who do the strongest work. People often rise by appearing politically reliable and institutionally credible, sometimes regardless of whether their actual contribution is especially strong.

Information stops circulating as neutral fact and becomes currency in its own right. It matters less whether something is true than whether it’s useful, and anointed authorities decide which truths are safe to acknowledge.

Overall, workplace politics is the ordinary machinery of influence that takes over once preserving the organisation matters more than serving its stated purpose.

Politics isn’t the problem. It’s the operating system.

In late-stage workplaces, immunosurveillance becomes a constant background activity, with everyone participating whether they realise it or not. People pick up on small shifts, repeat remarks they happened to overhear, compare impressions in corridors, and work out who or what is beginning to register as a threat. By the time anything reaches a formal process, the classification has usually already happened, and the situation isn’t being treated as a neutral problem to assess.

Most signals pass through unnoticed, but the ones that disturb internal order attract attention quickly. Sometimes that’s genuine misconduct. Just as often it’s a competent person pointing to something the organisation would rather keep buried. These are often people acting in good faith, unaware that naming what they see has already altered how they will be perceived. From that point, responses across the workplace begin to align in ways that resemble an immune response to a foreign body.

Once a signal is flagged, re-classification begins and the status of the person carrying it starts to change. A high performer might be praised and trusted for years, but once they get too confident and begin to ask questions they’re not authorised to ask, their competence acquires a different meaning.

The process is predictable and often resembles a prolonged humiliation ritual. For the person inside it, this can be profoundly destabilising. Not only is their credibility inside the system being dismantled, but often their sense of reality about what is happening to them as well. The issue itself slips into the background while attention shifts to the person who raised it, and how to best remove the threat.

This is the autoimmune response in organisational life, where something concerning has been detected but the response turns against the carrier rather than the fault itself. The system can no longer distinguish between threat and diagnosis, and the messenger becomes the target while the underlying problem remains.

The reverse pattern appears too in the form of immunosuppression, where signals that would expose something too costly to acknowledge are dampened or ignored. Problems are downplayed because acknowledging them would trigger scrutiny the organisation isn’t structured to handle. The fault persists because suppressing the signal is treated as less risky than activating a response.

That’s why workplace politics appears so irrational from the inside. People think they’re watching reasoned decisions when they’re often watching an immune response select its target in service of self-preservation.

The political ecosystem no one admits exists

Workplaces generate an entire ecosystem of outside actors who are often treated as though they’re all doing versions of the same repair work when they’re not. Some are beautifying the story, some are helping people inside the system manage the moral distress of remaining within it, some are helping people survive it and move on, and some are pushing out paperwork once the damage has already been done.

This is also where important distinctions between these roles are often lost. My work is often grouped together with consultants, leadership experts, culture advisers, and workplace repair specialists as if we’re all operating in the same lane when we’re not. Confusion occurs because every role around a dysfunctional workplace is mistaken for some version of fixing it. Many people in these roles are acting in good faith, trying to reduce confusion, improve conditions, or help people make sense of experiences that are often deeply difficult to navigate.

Perception managers. These are the visible experts with the polished frameworks, keynote language, and neat infographics about culture, leadership, safety, and trust. They give everyone elegant ways to describe dysfunction without disturbing the structure producing it. Their real talent is narrative management. They make the workplace legible so leadership can tolerate mild disturbances, which is why they’re so welcome there. They rarely remove distortion, but they often make it easier for institutions to live with it.

Alignment practitioners. They’re different and often more useful. They can see the gap between what an organisation says and what it does, and they help leaders narrow that gap just enough to make the place feel less morally compromising. They help decent people inside compromised systems act with a little more integrity. But let’s not exaggerate — they’re making small adjustments rather than changing the system itself.

Reality restorers. They’re a bit different in that their work begins where the others’ end. These practitioners don’t care about an organisation’s self-image enough to try to improve it. Nor are they there to help leadership realign. They work with the people who’ve been targeted as the problem. These are often competent people who weren’t politically savvy, said something unauthorised, and got caught in the autoimmune response. Reality restorers help them clearly see the system they’re in rather than the distorted version they were told they were in.

Enforcers. These are the investigators, assessors, workplace psychologists, and formal reviewers who arrive once the immune response is already underway. By then the classification has happened. Their role is to translate it into procedure, documentation, findings, and consequences, all wrapped in the reassuring language of neutrality.

The first three roles remain inside the political ecosystem, even when they soften or challenge parts of it. They help the system explain itself, refine itself, or carry out what it has already set in motion, while reality restorers are doing something else entirely — to help people stop mistaking it for something it’s not.

Now what?

This is usually the moment when someone proposes better leadership, transparency, stronger policy enforcement process, or perhaps a fresh workshop on crucial conversations as though one more laminated framework might finally do the trick.

It reflects how deeply many people still want to believe these systems can become what they claim to be, and how hard it is to let go of the redemption narrative once you’ve invested in it.

If the workplace is doing exactly what it is built to do, then the question is no longer how to repair it but how long you intend to keep arguing with its nature. Many people spend years trying to persuade an organisation to become something it has already shown no interest in being.

That recognition is rarely immediate or clean. For many people it comes only after years of trying to make sense of contradictions that never resolved, while assuming the fault must somehow be their own.

The real shift comes when the fantasy of reform gives way to recognition. Once you understand that the workplace is preserving itself, not failing by accident, your choices change. You stop treating every contradiction as a problem to solve and start deciding whether this is a game whose rules you are willing to live under. This is the essence of agency.

That’s what most workplace discourse avoids saying out loud. Not every environment is meant to be fixed and not every misfit is a call to activism. Sometimes the clearest sign of intelligence is recognising when to leave.

There is no such thing as a toxic system. There’s a system you’ve outgrown and the mismatch is now having a toxic effect on you. From there, you’re free to decide what comes next on your own terms.

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Hacking Narcissism is for people trying to make sense of and effectively navigate a morally distorting and chaotic age. When moral development is disincentivised, people lose reliable reference points for discernment and struggle to distinguish between what’s real, what’s performative, and what’s covertly shaping their perception.

Narcissistic traits are expressed in everyone (often referred to as Cluster B traits). They flourish during periods of moral decline because they help secure status, protection, and significance in environments where norms of what appears correct, rather than what is grounded in moral principles, regulate behaviour. The effect of this behaviour is experienced in all types of relationships, including in workplaces, where people can be punished for violating norms they never agreed to and were never made explicit.

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