The Silent Shipwrecks, Part 1: Mediocrity is the Slow Death to Obscurity

While sailing the high seas of complex IT delivery, I watched a team make a "strategic" decision that effectively outsourced their thinking.

They'd moved to a new cloud SaaS platform - sold to leadership as agility. Within months, they could no longer make a basic REST API call without vendor involvement. When I asked whether they could implement a simple object-based integration, I got blank stares. Not resistance. Confusion. As if I'd asked them to build a rocket. The platform didn't support it, so it became impossible. Not difficult. Impossible.

They called themselves agile. They held stand-ups. They spoke the language of modern delivery. But working with them felt like watching a crew that had forgotten how to read the stars - entirely dependent on GPS they didn't understand. Every request hit a platform limitation. Every problem required a workaround. Every solution felt… adequate.

They hadn't lost capability in a crisis.

They'd quietly decided it was optional.

It reminded me of a FTSE company I once worked for whose commercial function had too many products - and not enough courage. Rather than killing four mediocre offerings to properly fund one exceptional product, leadership spread resources across all five. Everything became adequately terrible: good enough to justify existence, poor enough to matter to no one.

I left. Watching that slow institutional suicide was unbearable.

These aren't isolated incidents. They're symptoms of something deeper; what I think of as organisational entropy: the gravitational pull toward comfortable mediocrity that eventually drags companies into obscurity.

The Strategic Trap: Stuck in the Middle

Decades ago, Michael Porter warned that sustainable competitive advantage requires choice. You must decide whether to be the cost leader or the differentiator. The fatal mistake is attempting both or worse, committing fully to neither.

This "stuck in the middle" position isn't neutral. It's a death trap. ☠️

Everyone knows the story of America's once-dominant retailer, Sears. It tried to compete on price with Walmart, on quality with Target, and on convenience with Amazon. It succeeded at none of them. Its prices were too high for discount shoppers, its stores too dilapidated for quality seekers, its online experience too clunky for digital natives.

Sears didn't fail because of a single catastrophic decision.

It died from a thousand small acceptances of "good enough."

The low-code platform team is stuck in their own middle. They're not fast enough to be truly agile - every constraint requires vendor escalation. And they're no longer capable enough to build bespoke solutions when it matters. They chose the comfort of "the platform will handle it" over the discipline of maintaining engineering capability.

The FTSE commercial function made the same choice. Killing products would have been uncomfortable. Someone might have been upset. So everything stayed alive and slowly bled to death.

This feels like prudence. It's actually strategic cowardice.

The Zone of Indifference: Where Customers Wait to Leave

Here's what most organisations misunderstand: customer satisfaction is not customer loyalty.

Research by Jones and Sasser identified the "Zone of Indifference" - the vast middle ground where customers report being "satisfied" but feel no emotional connection to your brand.

In Net Promoter Score terms, these are your 7s and 8s: the Passives. They look healthy on dashboards. In reality, they're exit risks disguised as stability. A Passive customer can be worth less than half a Promoter. In some industries, Promoters spend over 140% more than customers with merely average experiences.

Mediocrity doesn't create angry customers. It creates replaceable ones.

Passives don't complain. They don't escalate. They simply vanish when something marginally better appears. They're passengers with no loyalty to the Captain or Crew. When a sleeker vessel pulls alongside, they jump ship without a backward glance. They're the silent churn that makes your revenue base look stable on spreadsheets while actually being extraordinarily fragile.

Mediocre organisations accumulate Passives like sediment. Every "good enough" interaction. Every "we'll escalate that to our vendor." Every "that's our process." The customer isn't angry enough to leave immediately, but they're building no emotional equity. When a competitor offers even modest improvement, the entire sediment layer shifts.

Industries built on commoditised, mediocre service often suffer churn rates around 25%. That means replacing a quarter of your customer base every year just to stand still... an expensive treadmill powered by the failure to be excellent!

The Bozo Explosion: How Mediocrity Compounds

There's a reason mediocrity spreads.

Steve Jobs described it bluntly as the Bozo Explosion.

A-players hire A-players. They're secure enough to want challenge. But B-players, competent but insecure, hire C-players so they remain the smartest person in the room. C-players hire D-players. Quickly, the organisation fills with what Jobs called "bozos."

This isn't about intelligence. It's about insecurity.

Once B-players dominate middle management, they form a firewall against excellence. High performers are seen not as assets, but as threats. The organisation loses its ability to self-correct because the very people who could fix problems can't survive the environment long enough to do so.

Mediocrity becomes self-protecting.

The Normalisation of Deviance: Drifting into Failure

Sociologist Diane Vaughan studied the Challenger disaster and uncovered something unsettling: NASA didn't suddenly become reckless. It drifted into disaster through what she called the normalisation of deviance.

A standard gets violated. Nothing bad happens.

So it happens again. Still no disaster.

Eventually, the violation becomes normal. The boundaries of acceptable behaviour incrementally widen until catastrophe becomes inevitable.

That's how ships drift onto reefs in calm weather - not through dramatic error, but through a thousand small course deviations that never get corrected back.

This is mediocrity's primary mechanism in organisations.

Maybe a team skips a code review to hit a deadline. The system doesn't crash. So next sprint, they skip it again. Eventually, code reviews disappear entirely. When asked to build something that demands quality, the team is genuinely confused - they've normalised the absence of excellence.

The FTSE commercial function normalised underfunding products the same way. The first year, they spread budget across all five products "temporarily." Sales didn't collapse immediately, so they did it again. By year five, nobody remembered that starving products of investment was supposed to be an emergency measure. It had become "how we work."

Project Managers normalise loose risk management the same way. Skip updating the risk register once because you're busy. Nothing catastrophic happens. Skip it again. Eventually, you're a "professional" PM whose practice consists of PowerPoint RAG slides, Excel RAID logs, and hoping team heroics save you when things go wrong.

Vaughan's research shows this isn't usually malicious - it's social and structural. People become so accustomed to deviant behaviour that they no longer see it as deviant.

The most dangerous part?

Teams caught in this drift genuinely believe they're performing well.

They've normalised away the capability to recognise their own decay.

The Mediocrity Sandwich: Three Reinforcing Layers

The most insidious aspect of organisational mediocrity is how it propagates vertically through three reinforcing layers:

Strategic cowardice at the top: Leadership refuses to make hard trade-offs. They want to serve everyone, alienate no one, and avoid the discomfort of clear choices. This ambiguity trickles down, confusing the organisation about priorities.

Middle management entropy: The Bozo layer acts as a buffer, absorbing urgency and converting it into bureaucratic process. Strategic intent from the top; even if it were clear gets diluted before reaching the frontlines. Exceptions become routine. Deviations get signed off "just this once." This is where normalisation of deviance thrives and where drift accelerates fastest.

Frontline indifference: Undertrained, under-supported, and unclear on purpose, frontline teams deliver transactions not relationships. The Zone of Indifference gets shipped directly to customers.

Each layer reinforces the next. Ambiguity creates budget conflict. Budget conflict drives safe hiring and training cuts. Training cuts degrade service. Poor service increases churn. Churn creates financial pressure - which leadership answers with even safer strategies.

Breaking this cycle requires precisely the kind of chaotic intervention that risk-averse, mediocre cultures are designed to prevent.

Mediocrity survives because no single layer feels responsible for the outcome.

So the drift continues until the capital runs out.

The Storm-Tested Difference

Here's what crystallises for me: mediocre organisations aren't tested by storms; because they've already normalised away the capabilities that create resilience.

The platform team didn't lose capability overnight. They'd spent months treating core skills as redundant because "the platform handles it." When the platform couldn't, their mediocrity was exposed. They'd been sailing in protected waters for so long, they'd forgotten how to reef the sails when the wind picked up.

The FTSE company didn't suddenly become strategically confused. They'd spent years avoiding choice. When market conditions tightened and customers demanded clarity, mediocrity turned fatal.

Storm-Tested organisations choose differently.

They keep charts even after installing GPS. They retain Crew members who know celestial navigation even when automation makes it feel unnecessary. They practice sailing manually in calm waters; because they understand that "good enough" is most dangerous when conditions change.

Mediocrity isn't neutral. It's entropic. The drift is gradual and often invisible from the inside. By the time decay is obvious, organisations are usually too depleted, financially and culturally to reverse course.

The slow death to obscurity isn't dramatic. There's no single catastrophic moment. Just a thousand small acceptances of "good enough." Each one feels pragmatic. Each one moves you slightly further from excellence. The low-code platform that makes you "agile" until it makes you dependent. The multi-product strategy that keeps everyone comfortable until you're irrelevant to everyone. Until one day, nobody needs what you offer anymore because you spent years practising mediocrity while your competitors practised excellence.

The only escape is disciplined refusal. Maintaining capabilities that seem redundant. Paying for expertise that doesn't show immediate ROI. Choosing depth over breadth when breadth feels safer.

Because average isn't a safe harbour. It's the reef you hit when you stop checking your position.

The charts you throw overboard in calm weather are precisely the ones you'll need when the storm hits.

And the storm always hits eventually.

In Part 2, I'll argue that modern technology - especially AI and automation doesn't just expose mediocrity. It risks institutionalising it, systematically removing the very expertise organisations need when the consequences finally arrive.