Following the Hayne Royal Commission, blanket statements suggesting that it’s time to bring back the corporate bureaucrat would in fact not be the answer to preventing future occurrences of the exposed wrongdoings.

It’s not any one person who manifests situations such as the latest banking scandal at Westpac, but rather a failure of leadership to balance competing values, a framework recognized by the Financial Times as one of the 40 most important frameworks in the history of business.

The premise of the competing values framework is that there are four basic competing values within every enterprise: collaborate, create, compete, and control. These values compete in a very real sense for a corporation’s limited resources, such as funding, time and people. And the way leadership responds to the tension created between these values will shape a company’s culture, practices, products and ultimately how they innovate and grow.

In the case of the wrongdoings exposed by the Royal Commission, the tension isn’t between the corporate bureaucrat and the dynamic visionary, but rather between control and create, with not enough focus put on control. Whilst most organizations seek to balance between internal maintenance, stability and control, individual flexibility and external positioning, the key is knowing what to focus on, how much focus, and when.