Work the system, not the people

You are doing everything right.

You have the right people. You have given them feedback, support, room to grow. And still - the same problems keep coming back. Different time, different faces, same patterns.

That feeling is a signal worth taking seriously.

Every system produces exactly the results it is designed to produce. Not because people are not trying. Because people – all of us – behave according to the environment we are in. We respond to what gets rewarded, what gets ignored, where decisions actually happen, what information actually reaches us.

I have sat in rooms where everyone was exhausted from trying. Where emergency logistics ran through day and night to cover for a system that had lost its ability to correct itself. Nobody had designed it that way. Nobody wanted it that way. The system had simply evolved into something nobody had consciously chosen.

"Objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer." Heinz von Foerster

That is the moment the question changes.

Not: who is responsible?

But: what in the architecture makes this the most likely outcome? 

When that question becomes a habit, you start seeing things that were always there. Patterns in the friction. Logic in the dysfunction. And possibilities that training programs or coaching sessions never reach.

Where in your organization have you been solving a system problem by changing people?

This insight originally appeared on LinkedIn.