When a costly problem keeps returning despite capable people repeatedly trying to fix it, the most dangerous assumption may be that the failure belongs to the people closest to it.
That is one of the useful lessons CEOs can borrow from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.
Gladwell’s central argument is not really about recurring organisational problems. Outliers explores extraordinary success and challenges the idea that exceptional outcomes can be explained simply by exceptional individuals.
Talent matters. Effort matters. Intelligence matters.
But so do opportunity, timing, culture, accumulated experience and the environment in which people operate.
For CEOs dealing with karamawari, that shift in perspective is valuable.
Because recurring problems also have a context.
Stop studying the person in isolation
When something goes wrong repeatedly, organisations naturally look for the responsible person.
Why did the manager make that decision?
Why didn't the employee escalate?
Why didn't the executive intervene?
Why can't this team collaborate?
The questions are reasonable. But Outliers encourages us to widen the lens.
Instead of asking only what is different about the person producing an outcome, examine the conditions surrounding them.
That matters enormously with recurring problems.
Suppose three successive project managers have struggled to deliver the same programme.
Eventually, perhaps the project managers aren't the interesting variable.
Perhaps the environment is.
Unrealistic commitments. Fragmented authority. Competing incentives. Poor information. Political consequences for reporting delays. Dependence on resources controlled elsewhere.
Replace the project manager and the organisation may simply introduce another capable person into conditions that make failure likely.
Context can make behaviour rational
One of the most useful ideas in Outliers is that behaviour that appears puzzling when viewed individually can become understandable when its context is examined.
That principle belongs in every CEO's recurring-problem toolkit.
Imagine a business in which managers consistently delay escalating bad news.
Leadership might describe the problem as a lack of transparency or courage.
But investigate the history.
Perhaps managers who previously escalated problems were subjected to aggressive scrutiny. Perhaps executives rewarded people who "handled things themselves." Perhaps career progression favoured leaders associated with successful projects.
Suddenly, withholding bad news doesn't look inexplicable.
It looks learned.
This is central to understanding karamawari.
Conditions influence assumptions. Assumptions influence behaviours. Behaviours shape decisions. Decisions create impacts.
If leadership repeatedly intervenes only at the impact or behaviour level, the conditions remain capable of reproducing the problem.
Small advantages and disadvantages compound
Another valuable idea from Outliers is cumulative advantage.
Early advantages can create opportunities for further advantages, which create still more opportunities.
For CEOs, the uncomfortable corollary is that disadvantages can compound too.
Consider unclear decision rights.
Initially, the consequence may be minor. Someone escalates a decision unnecessarily.
Then others learn that escalation is safer.
Senior executives become increasingly involved.
Employees become less confident exercising judgement.
Executives conclude their teams lack capability.
More controls are introduced.
Those controls create further escalation.
Eventually, the organisation has created evidence supporting the very assumption its conditions helped produce.
The recurring problem is no longer one poor decision.
It has become a system capable of regenerating poor decisions.
History matters more than the latest incident
Outliers also reminds us that present outcomes can have surprisingly deep histories.
That should interest any CEO frustrated by a problem that has survived multiple fixes.
The temptation is to investigate the latest occurrence:
What happened this time?
But recurrence demands another question:
What has repeatedly made some version of this outcome possible?
The answer may predate the current leadership team.
An acquisition ten years ago may have created duplicated processes that were never properly integrated.
An old incentive structure may have encouraged behaviours that survived after the incentives changed.
A previous CEO's reaction to bad news may still influence what people are willing to report today.
Organisations have memories, even when nobody consciously remembers where their practices originated.
Today's irrational behaviour can be yesterday's rational adaptation.
The 10,000-hour idea needs careful handling
The famous idea associated with Outliers is that exceptional performance can emerge from enormous amounts of deliberate practice, popularly reduced to the "10,000-hour rule."
For karamawari, there is an intriguing inversion.
Organisations practise too.
Every time employees work around a broken process, they become better at working around it.
Every time managers rescue a crisis, the organisation becomes better at crisis management.
Every time executives compensate for unclear accountability, dependency on executives becomes more established.
Repetition doesn't necessarily make an organisation better.
It can make the wrong behaviour more deeply institutionalised.
That is why some highly dysfunctional organisations can appear remarkably competent. They have developed extraordinary capability in surviving problems they should have eliminated.
Where Outliers stops
None of this means Outliers provides a methodology for solving karamawari.
It doesn't.
Recognising contextual influences does not identify exactly which conditions are causal. Nor does it tell leadership how to distinguish correlation, history and organisational folklore from genuine drivers of recurrence.
That requires deeper diagnosis.
But Gladwell offers CEOs an extremely useful change of perspective:
Stop treating outcomes as though they were produced by individuals operating in a vacuum.
When the same problem survives different employees, managers, systems, restructures and improvement programmes, look at what remains relatively constant.
The organisation may have spent years replacing the actors while leaving the stage untouched.
And that leads to a more challenging question:
If different capable people keep producing versions of the same costly problem, what if the recurring failure isn't telling you something about your people at all, but something about the conditions you keep asking them to succeed within?
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