White Knights, One-Man Bands, Archetypes and Network Analysis

[Graham Durant-Law]

In my experience large bureaucracies often have high staff turnover and internal movement across silos. Most often this is because they are hierarchical organisations, and movement is necessary to obtain a promotion. But it also occurs because people are dissatisfied and moving to another job at the same level in a different part of the organisation is relatively easy. The problem with bureaucracies is the need for individuals to leave their mark in order to progress. Often this creates white knights and one-man bands. What do I mean?

White knights have been in the organisation before and have done a good job. They have been away for a while and their work has been largely invisible to their previous organisation. Now they come back and they believe they have sufficient authority and experience to fix problems as they saw them previously, and many in the organisation see them as the agent who can fix their existing problems. The trouble is the problems are different. White knights often don’t have situational awareness, and they don’t know what has changed in their absence. Worse still they don’t know why something was changed. They charge in with good intent to save the day, but create havoc all around them, and that havoc creates disillusion. ...

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