A regional fund underperforms its investment targets for three consecutive years. Each annual report attributes this to market conditions, pipeline development lag, or cautious investor sentiment. The fund's mandate, structure, and team remain unchanged.
Forgiveness is usually the right response to a single failure. It becomes a stall when it is the system's reliable response to repeated failure — when accommodation has become the design.
S3 is the stall that is hardest to argue against in the moment. The case for accommodation is almost always locally compelling. The fund has made progress, even if slowly. The team has relationships that took years to build. The market conditions really were difficult. Shutting it down now would waste the investment already made. A little more time, a revised target, a restructured mandate — these feel like reasonable responses.
They are reasonable. Each individual decision to accommodate rather than redesign is defensible. The stall is what those decisions accumulate into: a system that has learned that underperformance does not lead to structural change, only to better explanations of underperformance.
Repeated signals of non-movement are explained by timing, readiness, or context rather than triggering structural change. What it displaces: the ability to let weak signals force redesign.
Ecosystem Stewardship · Chapter 4S3 persists because redesign is costly in ways that go beyond resources. The fund's team has relationships — with government, with the investment community, with programme participants — that took years to develop and would be lost in a restructuring. The programme's alumni are stakeholders. The governance board has personal investments in the current configuration. Redesign does not just change the structure. It changes who matters.
This is the mechanism the book identifies across most stalls: once a behaviour entangles with roles and reputations, it is actively defended. The defence does not require bad faith. It requires only that the people defending the structure are responding rationally to what they stand to lose if it changes.
The diagnostic question for S3 is not whether any single programme has been forgiven — it is whether the system has a mechanism for structural redesign at all. Ask: in the last five years, has any programme been retired without the relevant organisation being dissolved? Has any mandate been materially changed in response to weak performance rather than strategic review? Has any team been restructured because of results rather than leadership succession?
Where the answer is no across all three, the system does not have a redesign function. It has an accommodation function that is described as performance management. These are different things, and confusing them is expensive over time.
The leverage move for S3 is to introduce one renewal decision where the question is not whether the programme should continue, but what it would look like if it were designed today, from scratch, knowing what is now known. Not whether it has met its targets — that conversation is already scripted. But: if we were starting this now, would we build it this way?
That question bypasses the accumulated defence of the existing structure and forces a comparison that contextualisation cannot absorb. The programme may survive the question. But it cannot survive it unchanged.
S3 has good X-side observability when programme performance data is available. The challenge is accessing it — underperformance data is often held internally and framed positively in public reporting. The Y-side — the absence of redesign — is visible in programme continuity records. Confidence increases when the same programme or mandate has been renewed without material structural change across three or more cycles while reporting persistent underperformance against original targets.
The diagnostic identifies which stalls are operating in your cluster — and which stacks they form. That is where intervention design begins.
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