You Won’t Believe What Was Holding This Company Back! And Then This Happened…

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You Won’t Believe What Was Holding This Company Back! And Then This Happened…

The surprising story of how a tech company doubled their productivity by changing something invisible—their shared assumptions about how work works (A true story)

When the CEO of a mid-sized software company looked at his development team’s performance metrics, he had every reason to be frustrated.

It was a software company that looked remarkable from the outside. Yet their productivity felt stuck in quicksand.

‘We were asking for a revolution in productivity’, the CEO would later reflect, ‘but we had no revolutionaries—and our assumptions were holding back even the possibility of revolutionary thinking.’

The Usual Suspects

Like most tech companies facing productivity challenges, this organisation had already tried the conventional playbook:

Agile methodologies? ✓ ImplementedBetter project management tools? ✓ UpgradedOptimisation initiatives? ✓ RefinedPerformance metrics? ✓ Tracked religiously

Sound familiar? If you’re a leader in tech, you’ve checked off similar boxes. The tools and approaches were there. The talent was there. The strategy was clear.

So why wasn’t it working?

Enter the Unconventional Solution

That’s when the CEO made a decision that would have raised eyebrows in most boardrooms. Instead of hiring another expert or implementing another framework, he brought in someone who practised something called ‘Organisational Psychotherapy’.

Not organisational development. Not change management. Psychotherapy. For a company.

‘Many of us were both hopeful and sceptical’, admits the Director of Development. ‘Especially when we discovered we had to work to find our own answers.’

The Hidden Problem: Incompatible Worldviews

What this person discovered wasn’t about their code, their tools, or their approaches. It was about something far more fundamental yet completely invisible: the shared assumptions and beliefs that governed how people thought work should work.

When he mapped out how the organisation actually operated versus what they needed for success, the contrast was startling:

How They Were Operating:

Individual contributors working in isolationManagers controlling the work and the workersEach department focused only on their own metricsMandated ways of working imposed from aboveRules and policies governing behaviourOnly management’s needs really matteredPeople brought only their ‘work face’ to the office

What They Actually Needed:

Teams working together collaborativelySelf-organisation around clear outcomesSystemic measures serving the bigger picturePeople owning how the work worksTrust as the operating principleEveryone’s needs matterPeople bringing their whole, authentic selves to work

These weren’t just different approaches—they were fundamentally incompatible worldviews. The transformation required shifting from one to the other.

The Transformation: New Shared Beliefs

The breakthrough wasn’t about changing what people did. It was about fundamentally shifting from one way of thinking to another.

With support from organisational psychotherapy, people began to surface and examine the beliefs that were unconsciously driving their behaviour. They discovered they’d been operating according to assumptions that directly contradicted what was needed for success.

The shift was gradual. People were hesitant about this approach, and some were even downright negative. But over time, as the fundamental assumptions and beliefs began to change—especially amongst senior management—they started trusting people instead of controlling them.

The Results: Extraordinary Performance

Over a six-month period, the development organisation experienced an extraordinary transformation:

Their development throughput increased by 80%.

To put this in perspective: Gerald Weinberg’s “Ten Percent Promise Law” from The Secrets of Consulting states “Never promise more than ten percent improvement,” knowing that anything more would be embarrassing if the consultant succeeded. Yet here was an organisation that had achieved an 8x improvement over that “safe” threshold—not by accident, but because their CEO had the foresight to try a radically different approach.

Projecting that improvement forward suggested an annualised productivity increase of 160%. In other words: they would have more than doubled their output in a single year.

This wasn’t achieved through:

Working longer hoursAdding more peopleImplementing new tools

It came from them transforming their shared assumptions and beliefs that governed how people actually worked together—particularly at the leadership level.

The Critical Insight

In retrospect, these results were absolutely contingent on the changing of collective beliefs and assumptions—including those held by senior management.

The same people who had been underperforming suddenly became extraordinarily productive. What changed were the shared assumptions about ‘how we do things here’—including assumptions about which tools and approaches actually served them.

When people’s shared assumptions support their shared goals, extraordinary performance becomes possible.

The Lesson That Changes Everything

Most organisational change efforts focus on changing behaviours and structures. But behaviours are just the visible tip of the iceberg. Below the surface are the shared assumptions and beliefs that actually drive those behaviours.

These invisible agreements include beliefs about people—whether humans are naturally motivated and trustworthy (Theory Y) or need constant oversight and control (Theory X). They include assumptions about how authority should work—whether managers should own and control how work gets done, or whether the people doing the work should have that ownership. They encompass beliefs about what motivates people—whether fear, obligation, guilt and shame are effective motivators, or whether trust, autonomy and purpose work better.

Organisations also operate on hidden assumptions about learning—whether the organisation can and should adapt and evolve, or whether established ways should be preserved. They hold invisible beliefs about quality—whether it comes from prevention and building things right the first time, or from inspection and testing after the fact. Even beliefs about the nature of work itself—whether it should feel like obligation and drudgery, or whether it can be engaging and even playful.

These hidden beliefs are what determine whether any change initiative will stick or quietly fade away.

You can implement all the frameworks you want, but if people’s shared assumption is that ‘admitting you don’t know something is dangerous’, your retrospectives will be shallow and your learning will be slow.

What This Means for You

The invisible assumptions in your organisation are either your secret weapon or your hidden constraint. The question is: how do you even begin to surface beliefs that are, by definition, unconscious?

You can’t simply ask people to examine their own assumptions—that’s not how this kind of deep change works. Instead, it requires creating conditions where these hidden beliefs become visible through experience and observation.

The answers will surprise you. They will also reveal why certain initiatives never quite take hold, why some groups consistently outperform others, or why productivity improvements seem to hit invisible ceilings.

The Bottom Line

This company’s 80% productivity increase didn’t come from better tools or new methods. It came from gradually and collectively surfacing and reflecting on the shared assumptions that govern how people work together.

Everything is contingent on the invisible collective beliefs that manifest in your organisational culture.

Change the assumptions, and you change everything else. Leave them unexamined, and they’ll continue to invisibly limit what’s possible.

The revolution in productivity you’re looking for does not require new methods or technologies. It requires making the invisible visible, and growing into new shared beliefs that better serve your goals.

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