Dissociated organisations — Statecraft

Jacob Huibers — Statecraft, April 2026

Context for readers outside the Netherlands

A brief primer on Dutch institutions is useful before reading the paper proper.

The Dutch Tax Authority (Belastingdienst) sits under the Ministry of Finance and administers most national taxes and benefits in the Netherlands. It is the institutional protagonist of the childcare benefits scandal (toeslagenaffaire) — between roughly 2005 and 2019, the Tax Authority unlawfully accused tens of thousands of parents, disproportionately of dual nationality or migrant background, of fraud in claiming childcare benefits. The Mark Rutte government resigned in January 2021 over the affair. A parliamentary inquiry (PEFD) followed, with a still-ongoing compensation operation. The “data vault” referenced throughout this paper is a sealed digital storage environment at the Tax Authority, holding at least 64 million uncategorised files, that emerged in April 2026 — seven years after its existence was first formally announced to Parliament without anyone substantively examining its contents thereafter.

BUIG is the Dutch national funding line through which municipalities finance social assistance and related welfare benefits to residents. When a municipality runs over budget, it can apply to the State for a top-up, after assessment by an independent advisory committee.

Key Dutch institutions referenced: the Tweede Kamer (House of Representatives) is the directly elected lower chamber of parliament. A staatssecretaris (state secretary) is a junior minister with a delegated portfolio. The Algemene Bestuursdienst (Senior Public Service, abbreviated ABD) is the corps of senior civil servants designed to rotate between ministries. Gemeenten (municipalities) are the lowest directly elected tier of Dutch government. A parlementaire enquête (parliamentary inquiry) is the heaviest investigative instrument available to the Dutch parliament, carrying the power to compel documents and witnesses under oath.

Joost Kampen is the Dutch organisational researcher and consultant whose concept of verwaarloosde organisaties (“neglected organisations”) forms the intellectual point of departure for this paper. His diagnosis, drawn by analogy from orthopedagogy, has shaped two decades of Dutch organisational change practice. This paper engages his work directly, both in extension and in critique.

The forgotten vault

In April 2019 the then-state secretary for Finance announced in two letters to Parliament that the Dutch Tax Authority would hold hundreds of millions of outdated documents in a separate, shielded data environment. The arrangement was GDPR-compliant, pending inventory and either archival storage or destruction under the national Archives Act. An institutional solution to an institutional problem. Nobody was hiding anything. The arrangement was on the public record.

Seven years later, in April 2026, it emerged that this vault contained sixty-four million documents that should have been delivered to the Parliamentary Inquiry into Fraud and Service Provision. The discovery came from a sampling exercise. In the intervening years no one had looked at the vault. The Central Government Audit Service had not. The Data Protection Authority had not. The National Ombudsman had not. The two successive state secretaries had not. The vault was not hidden. It was forgotten.

This is a different type of scandal from the childcare benefits affair or the Groningen gas extraction case. In those, information was actively withheld, advice ignored, signals suppressed under pressure. Here we see something stranger. An organisation that explicitly announced what it was storing, then systematically stopped seeing it, and thereby structurally forgot what it had itself recorded. Not through one person. Through a chain of institutions each of which formally fulfilled its role correctly and which together let a dossier evaporate for seven years. That is not concealment. That is dissociation at the system level.

”The advisory committee is presumed to do its work correctly”

A second observation, on a different scale. A municipality runs over its welfare safety-net budget — the national funding line from which it pays social assistance and related welfare benefits to residents. For this kind of overrun a top-up regulation exists: the municipality can apply to the State for a supplementary allocation, after recommendation by an independent advisory committee and review by a second committee. In this case the advisory committee makes an evident error. Not contestable, not interpretable — simply wrong. The review committee adopts the report and confirms the outcome. The ministry adopts it and decides accordingly. The administrative court applies marginal review, with reasoning that effectively comes down to the proposition that the advisory committee is presumed to do its work correctly, so the substance need not be reassessed. Four links in the chain, each procedurally correct, one evident error, and the result is institutional unassailability.

This is not an incident and not the failure of an individual official. It is how the system was designed. Marginal review was for many years standing case law and had good grounds, namely that the court is not an administrative body. The review committee is supposed to base itself on the recommendation. The ministry follows the chain. Each link does what it should, and no one can correct what the first link got wrong.

Since the childcare benefits scandal, Dutch administrative case law has been in motion. The Council of State explicitly distanced itself in 2022 from the strict marginal review for far-reaching administrative powers, and broadened the proportionality test. This shift mostly takes effect where citizens are individually disproportionately affected and fundamental rights are at stake. For the administrative-to-administrative relationship between municipality and central government, in which not a citizen but a fellow-government is the applicant, the older logic remains in place. The system corrects haltingly where harm to citizens forces it to, and continues its original operation where the actors themselves are governments that should, by the logic of the system, participate as equals. That the chain proves impenetrable for the party that under the Municipalities Act and the Financial Relations Act is by design an equivalent participant says something about what plays out for citizens without resources, legal apparatus or formal standing.

What this connects to the data vault is not the nature of the error but the nature of the chain. In both cases each link is formally correct and the sum of that correctness is an outcome no one would have chosen had the system been able to oversee it in one go. In both cases what is missing is the place where substance weighs more than procedure. In both cases that absence is not an omission but a design choice — often with sound separate grounds — that collectively produces what it did not separately intend.

What Kampen saw, and what has been added

In a three-part essay on ManagementSite in 2007, Joost Kampen and the orthopedagogue Alje Mulder introduced the term “neglected organisation” to a wider Dutch audience. An organisation “in the process of decay”, they wrote in their opening framing. A stronger word than has been applied to organisations in the literature since, and a fitting one. Kampen worked the idea out in his doctoral research at the VU University Amsterdam and in a series of by now five books. The analogy came from orthopedagogy. A neglected child is not an abused child. Abuse is active; neglect is the systematic failure to provide what development requires: attention, structure, direction, guidance. The child that grows up under such conditions develops recognisable patterns. Sham adaptation to avoid confrontation. Clever defensive behaviour. An incapacity for reflection from fear of rejection. Denial of one’s own responsibility from fear of guilt.

Kampen’s contribution was to recognise these patterns at the organisational level. His definition stands: a neglected organisation is one in which there has been a sustained absence of attention and structure in daily practice, and of direction and guidance in development. His diagnosis is sharp, his recovery model is empirically grounded, and his work on destructive consultancy lays out at length the planned-change models that do not work in neglected organisations. In his April 2025 masterclass he uses the Tax Authority’s 2021 annual plan as a case for participants to read with the lens of neglected organisations. He does not miss the pattern, and he does not slip into it.

What his work does, and what marks the boundary of what it can explain, is that the unit of analysis remains the individual organisation. The diagnosis concerns one organisation. The recovery model works on one organisation. The six developmental stages (stop the neglect, get the basics in order, render the informal organisation redundant, professionalise, integrate development, secure continuity) take one organisation through. His observation that full recovery takes as long as the neglect itself is a recognisable finding in the Dutch change-management literature. Hans Vermaak and Léon de Caluwé have shown in their work on intractable problems how organisational patterns persist across generations of leaders, with the Amsterdam GVB transport case as a frequently discussed example in both their writing and Kampen’s.

What none of these frames fully renders visible is what happens to recovery when the institutional context in which the recovering organisation operates has itself simultaneously migrated. A fully recovered organisation would, under the Kampen model, recover in the present-day Dutch executive state to what is now considered normal in that field. That is a different norm from twenty years ago. The thesis of this series is not that Kampen’s diagnosis is wrong. It is that his frame, and the frames that stand alongside it, leave one question unanswered which for the Dutch executive state in 2026 is the most acute. If the norm towards which recovery directs itself has itself shifted, what does recovery still mean?

Four dossiers, one institutional condition

Four prior publications on Statecraft each describe, from a specific occasion, a Dutch executive-government dossier. On rereading they show the same pattern: not within one organisation but in the institutional architecture that carries organisations and lets them connect to each other. This paper opens the series in which that pattern is given a common name.

Navigating versus Planning described the Dutch governance practice in which organisations produce progress reports on plans that no longer touch reality. The diagnosis in that paper stayed with the function of the plan: legitimation, accountability, false certainty. What that diagnosis does not address is that an individual organisation that wished to stop this ritual would thereby withdraw from the accountability traffic in which all other organisations continue to participate. The ritual cannot be ended within one organisation. It has become institutional standard practice.

The paper on vacation real estate and implicit choices described how the Dutch state systematically makes choices without choosing them. A fiscal change here, an enforcement line there, a prohibition that gradually shifts a market — and behind the whole, no one who has wanted or been able to draw the sum. What this paper makes explicit is that the implicit choice is not the expression of immature decision-making within one administrative body. It is what inevitably happens when multiple institutions each make their own decisions well and no one is charged with the coherence of the whole. The architecture produces implicit choices as a by-product.

The paper on scarcity described four modes of action under grid congestion and nitrogen constraints: redefine the norm, shift the scale, allocate transparently, buy time. Diagnosis and action repertoire, in that order. What that paper did not address is the political-administrative question of why external scarcity in the Netherlands does not produce the common-enemy pattern historically visible in wars, pandemics and floods. A healthy administrative layer would have closed ranks under simultaneous pressure. What we actually saw was an intensification of isolation. Fifteen municipalities with the same applications, no cooperation. Provinces defending their own share. A central government working minister-by-minister. Not from ill will, but because the institutional architecture forces every level into its own accountability in its own domain, making cooperation a deviation rather than the logical response.

The architecture of silence described the Tax Authority data vault as a case application of a broader mechanism of organisational self-protection. What the frame of this series adds is that the vault also worked without anyone actively concealing. The apparatus had the capacity to announce something and then not see it again for seven years. Four supervisory bodies, two successive state secretariats, a parliamentary inquiry with the heaviest investigative instrument the House of Representatives possesses: none of them had the contents of the vault in view before a sampling exercise revealed them. That is not incompetence. That is the absence, in the design of the chain, of a place where substance can land.

Four dossiers, one common condition. Not within the organisation, but in the way organisations surround each other and are aligned with each other. The exterior reports, chooses, allocates, archives. The interior has had its connection to what that means systematically severed. That severance is not a result of individual failure, but of structural design.

Connection as intervention

Whoever tries to solve this with more supervision or heavier sanctions makes it worse. That is not a political preference; it is an observation. Harder sanctions on documented errors raise the incentive not to document. Stricter supervisory frameworks lengthen the chain and create additional places where substance can evaporate. Personal liability for senior civil servants leads to defensive organisational cultures in which no one decides any more, no one signs, and all responsibility runs through collective bodies that cannot be held to account as individuals. We have seen this pattern in healthcare, education, youth care and housing corporations. Supervision that depends on what the supervised chain chooses to deliver is not supervision. It is a new link in the same chain.

What does work — or more precisely, what works less badly — is connection. Not as a therapeutic concept and not as a participation promise, but as a design principle. Connection is here the constructed place where substance weighs more than procedure, where correction of an evident error can actually land, where someone has the authority to say “this does not add up” in a way that changes the chain. In Kampen’s vocabulary this is the change-process conscience. He uses the term for the external advisor who in a neglected organisation fills the role that has disappeared internally. For the institutional architecture the same role is needed at a different scale: places that force the entire chain to take substantive weight, not once per crisis but as a regular provision.

Concretely this requires a different design philosophy for executive organisations and their supervisory chains. Immutable audit trails, so that information loss cannot be solved within the chain. Direct source access for supervision, instead of reports pre-processed by the supervised organisation. Whistleblower channels that actually work, combining anonymisation at source, external handling outside the organisation’s own column, and legal immunity for material disclosures. A form of substantive review in objection and appeal chains that reaches further than marginal review on specific grounds where the first link has made an evident error. Decoupling civil-service careers from column loyalty, so that openness is no longer a career cost.

None of these interventions is a silver bullet. Together they form a design that does not deny the human tendency towards self-protection but redirects it. This is what is described in the forthcoming book The Direction of Movement as the Aiki method — no longer as a technique for handling resistance to change but as a design principle for institutions capable of letting correction in. Diagnosis and action repertoire here coincide. Whoever understands why evident errors no longer land can build an institutional architecture in which they do.

For interim management practice this changes what assignments mean. Not primarily the execution of a predefined plan. Not primarily the resolution of an isolated problem. But the restoration of places in the organisation and its chain where substance can land again, at a scale and pace that is manageable. That is slower and harder to account for than the conventional interim assignment. It is also the only intervention that holds, because it works on the cause and not on the symptom.

The open question

Kampen’s observation that recovery takes as long as the neglect itself rests on an assumption that is defensible for one organisation and that remains unanswered for an institutional system. The assumption is that there exists a healthy reference point towards which recovery can direct itself. For one department in a larger organisation that reference point is the normal functioning of comparable departments elsewhere. For one organisation in an institutional system that reference point is the functioning of comparable organisations. But if the system itself is in motion, and the patterns we recognise as neglect are everywhere present in comparable measure, what then is the reference point towards which recovery can direct itself?

This is not a rhetorical question. It is the actual question under this entire dossier and the one that within existing recovery models cannot be answered. An individual organisation taken through Kampen’s six stages recovers to what currently counts as normal in the field. That is not the reference point against which the model was historically calibrated. Whether that is recovery, or merely retraining to a shifted norm, is a question I cannot answer. I suspect it can only be answered by empirical research over a longer term than we have.

What we can do is work on places where connection is organised, in the knowledge that we do not know whether the sum of these places adds up to a recovered system or a retrained one. That is more modest than the pretension of much administrative-science literature, and more honest.

The series

This paper opens on Statecraft a series that develops the thesis sketched here through individual symptoms. Four symptoms warrant their own treatment. The growth of the reputation architecture — the apparatus of spokespersons, governance advisors and communications staff that now orients the organisation primarily outward and has thereby shifted the substantive column from centre to by-product. The reproduction inwards — the mechanism by which institutions form their own successors in the same patterns through rotation, external hire and the absence of mentoring above departmental level. The absorbed debt without integration — the financial signature of recovery operations costing two to ten times the original problems, without the underlying structure adapting. And the performative maturity — the apparatus of governance codes, integrity policies and compliance architectures that makes the exterior look matured while the integrative function beneath is missing.

Each symptom gets its own paper, in the same tone and length as the four prior publications. A closing synthesis binds the series and formulates what this developmental story means for principalship, interim management and administrative-science teaching. The papers appear in 2026 and 2027.

An invitation to dissent

Three cautions for the reader. The first is methodological. Dissociation is an individual-psychological category. Its application to organisations and to institutional architectures is metaphor with diagnostic pretensions, not clinical diagnosis. Whoever reads this paper as evidence that a specific organisation or a specific official is sick is reading it wrongly. The frame is useful for self-diagnosis, for peer reflection and for redesign. It is not a weapon to point at others.

The second is intellectual. The frame developed here is indebted to twenty years of Joost Kampen’s work, particularly his diagnosis of neglected organisations, his recovery model, his work on destructive consultancy, and the conceptual move he made with Alje Mulder in 2007. The difference I introduce concerns not the validity of his diagnosis but its reach. The question of whether his recovery model is sufficient when the institutional context in which a recovering organisation operates is itself in motion, I lay on the table without claiming to have answered it myself. Response and counter-argument are welcome.

The third is practical. This thinking is useful as long as it leads to movement. If it becomes a new vocabulary that the institutional architecture absorbs without integrating, then it adds a layer to precisely the problem it describes. It is the same trap that governance codes and integrity policies have demonstrated. That is why “dissociated organisations” is not a brand and not a positioning. It is a hypothesis that must be tested, and that testing begins here.

Colophon

“Dissociated organisations” is the introductory paper of an eponymous series on Statecraft. The series builds on the previously published Statecraft papers Navigating versus Planning, the paper on vacation real estate, the paper on scarcity, and the architecture of silence.

Statecraft is the platform of Jacob Huibers for strategic reflection on public-service delivery. The content connects to the forthcoming book “The Direction of Movement: Interim Management in the Public Sector” (forthcoming autumn 2026). The frame sketched here will take its own place in that book, between Part I and Part II, as developmental background against which the intervention methodology becomes more legible.

Response and counter-argument via Statecraft.

Jacob Huibers is an interim manager with more than twenty years of experience in the Dutch public sector. He has worked as cluster manager, cluster director and project lead for municipalities ranging from fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand inhabitants, and for regional inter-municipal partnerships.