I have been carrying this story for over three years.

A project in Germany. A system completely out of control. Productivity issues feeding quality issues feeding supply chain issues feeding people issues. A reinforcing loop nobody had named.

I was part of it.

When I had to leave the project for personal reasons, something shifted. I needed to step out.

And that's when I could finally see it.

Not the symptoms. The whole thing. The loops. The structure. The decisions that had been made years before anyone noticed the consequences.

Cybernetics has a name for this. The observer who is part of the system cannot see the system completely. Distance doesn't just change your perspective. It changes what's visible.

We were all focused on the parts. Nobody was looking at the system as a whole. 

You can optimize every part of a system and still make the whole worse.

That's not a failure of intelligence. It's a feature of complex systems. You don’t notice the water when you're the fish.

Last week I told this story publicly for the first time, at the Organisational Development Network Europe (ODNE) Digital Event. What surprised me wasn't the story itself. It was how familiar it felt to the people in the room.

Have you ever been too close to a system to see what was actually happening?

This insight originally appeared on LinkedIn.