Some recurring problems survive because leaders keep waiting to feel confident about an action that can only become clear by taking it.
It sounds sensible.
Before committing resources, changing direction or challenging an established way of working, leaders want confidence.
More analysis.
More evidence.
More certainty.
Another workshop.
Another review.
The assumption is that confidence should come first and action should follow.
But with complex recurring problems, the sequence is often reversed.
Action creates evidence. Evidence creates learning. Learning creates confidence.
When leaders demand confidence before action, they can inadvertently create the conditions for Karamawari.
Confidence Feels Like a Prerequisite
CEOs are expected to make good decisions.
The consequences can be significant, so caution is rational.
The difficulty arises when uncertainty itself becomes interpreted as evidence that the organisation is not ready to act.
Imagine a recurring customer problem.
Several fixes have already been attempted. Nobody is entirely certain why the problem keeps returning.
One group believes technology is responsible.
Another suspects process.
Operations blames unclear accountability.
Technology argues the underlying issue is poor data.
Leadership asks for greater confidence before approving another intervention.
Perfectly reasonable.
Except greater confidence may not be available through more discussion.
Sometimes you have reached the limit of what thinking alone can reveal.
Complex Problems Reveal Themselves Through Action
There is a fundamental difference between acting recklessly and acting experimentally.
Suppose you suspect unclear decision rights are contributing to repeated project delays.
You could spend three months analysing every delayed project.
Or you could change decision rights in one controlled area and observe what happens.
Did decisions accelerate?
Did new bottlenecks appear?
Did people behave differently?
Did escalation reduce?
Did the problem simply move elsewhere?
That action produces information that another meeting could never provide.
The objective was not to prove the hypothesis correct.
It was to learn.
This matters because recurring problems rarely have one clean, isolated cause. They emerge from interactions between conditions, assumptions, behaviours and decisions.
Sometimes the only way to understand those interactions is to disturb the system carefully and watch how it responds.
Waiting Has a Cost
Doing nothing can feel safer because its consequences are less visible.
But the recurring problem does not stop while leadership develops confidence.
Customers continue experiencing friction.
Employees continue compensating.
Management attention continues being consumed.
Margins continue leaking.
Workarounds become further embedded.
Risks accumulate.
And perhaps most importantly, people learn.
They learn that the problem is tolerated.
They learn which workaround keeps things moving.
They learn that escalation is easier than prevention.
They learn to operate successfully inside the problem.
Every month of waiting can therefore strengthen the conditions that allow recurrence.
Then Confidence Arrives From the Wrong Place
There is another danger.
When leaders want high confidence before acting, they naturally search for evidence supporting a sufficiently convincing explanation.
Eventually one hypothesis begins to dominate.
"We have a capability problem."
"This is a technology problem."
"The structure is wrong."
"People need greater accountability."
Confidence increases.
But confidence and correctness are not the same thing.
A compelling narrative can create confidence without improving diagnosis.
Now the organisation commits.
A new system is purchased.
People are trained.
Reporting increases.
The organisation restructures.
The intervention is executed competently.
Six months later, the symptoms return.
That is Karamawari.
Enormous effort has been applied, but the underlying conditions continue recreating the problem.
Replace Confidence With Reversibility
A better question for leaders is not always:
"Are we confident enough to act?"
It may be:
"Can we act in a way that is small enough to reverse but meaningful enough to teach us something?"
That changes the decision.
Instead of requiring certainty before movement, leadership creates controlled opportunities to learn.
Test one assumption.
Change one condition.
Remove one approval.
Alter one incentive.
Clarify one decision right.
Change one handoff.
Then observe.
The organisation is no longer betting heavily on being right.
It is investing modestly in becoming less wrong.
Action Can Be Part of Diagnosis
This is particularly important when previous solutions have failed.
The instinct may be to demand even greater certainty before trying again.
But repeated failure can indicate that the organisation has been treating action as something that happens after diagnosis.
For complex problems, action can sometimes be part of diagnosis.
Small, deliberate interventions reveal causal relationships.
They expose assumptions.
They show where resistance appears.
They reveal dependencies hidden inside processes.
They distinguish what people say drives behaviour from what actually drives it.
Confidence emerges from contact with reality.
The Karamawari Trap
空回り, karamawari, is effort without meaningful forward movement.
Ironically, organisations can create it while trying to avoid the risk of acting too soon.
They analyse until one explanation feels sufficiently convincing, then make a large commitment to it.
When it fails, they repeat the process.
More analysis.
More confidence.
Another large intervention.
Another recurrence.
The alternative is not recklessness.
It is disciplined experimentation.
For CEOs fed up with paying repeatedly for the same problems, that distinction matters.
You do not always need enough confidence to implement the final answer.
Sometimes you need just enough evidence to take the next reversible step and learn something you could not learn while standing still.
What if the confidence you are waiting for before acting on your recurring problem is actually something you can only acquire by acting on it?
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