Some recurring problems survive because the organisation keeps fixing the failure while preserving the conditions that created it.
Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 film RoboCop looks like a violent science-fiction satire about crime, technology and corporate power.
For CEOs wrestling with costly recurring problems, there is another way to read it.
The film is full of attempts to improve outcomes without seriously questioning the system producing them. Crime is treated as an enforcement problem. Police effectiveness becomes a technology problem. Human judgement becomes something to engineer around. Corporate ambition is dressed as progress.
Again and again, the response is impressive.
And again and again, something important underneath remains untouched.
That is remarkably close to karamawari.
The Organisation Wants a Better Fix
Omni Consumer Products, or OCP, approaches Detroit with the confidence of an organisation convinced that almost anything can be solved through sufficient technology, control and commercial ingenuity.
Its answer to dangerous policing is not primarily to understand why the environment is producing the outcomes it dislikes.
It builds better enforcement.
First comes ED-209, an intimidating robotic police officer. When its demonstration goes catastrophically wrong, the programme's fundamental assumptions deserve scrutiny.
Instead, another technological solution gets its opportunity.
RoboCop.
And RoboCop works extraordinarily well.
That is what makes the lesson interesting.
Recurring problems are not always sustained by solutions that fail.
Sometimes they are sustained by solutions that succeed at the wrong level.
Success Can Hide Misdiagnosis
RoboCop becomes remarkably effective at catching criminals.
But imagine viewing Detroit through a CEO's dashboard.
Arrests improve.
Police productivity increases.
Response effectiveness rises.
Crime-fighting capability looks stronger.
The temptation would be obvious: scale the solution.
Yet the underlying environment remains deeply dysfunctional. Institutional decay, corruption, competing incentives, corporate power and criminality continue shaping outcomes.
RoboCop is solving what appears in front of him.
He is not initially changing what keeps putting it there.
Organisations do this constantly.
Customer complaints generate service improvement programmes.
Delivery failures generate tighter project governance.
Margin erosion generates cost reduction.
Control failures generate more approvals.
Operational mistakes generate retraining.
Each response may produce measurable improvement.
But if the problem returns, leadership eventually needs to ask whether it has been measuring the effectiveness of the intervention rather than the disappearance of the problem.
Those are very different things.
Directives Are Conditions Too
One of RoboCop's most useful leadership metaphors is his programming.
RoboCop appears extraordinarily powerful, yet his behaviour is constrained by directives embedded within him.
The most important is hidden.
Directive 4 prevents him from acting against senior OCP executives.
That changes everything.
He has been given responsibility for an outcome while simultaneously being prevented from confronting one of the conditions undermining that outcome.
Organisations create their own versions of Directive 4.
A leader is told to improve profitability but cannot challenge an uneconomic legacy customer.
Operations must improve delivery but cannot refuse unrealistic commitments.
Executives are expected to collaborate while incentives reward functional optimisation.
People are told to escalate problems early but learn that delivering bad news damages careers.
The organisation then wonders why the problem persists.
The people may not be failing to execute.
They may be executing perfectly within contradictory conditions.
The Problem Behind the Problem
This is where RoboCop becomes particularly relevant to karamawari, 空回り, the idea of wheels spinning without traction.
When something keeps going wrong, organisations naturally concentrate on the visible impact.
But recurring problems invite a different journey:
Impacts → Decisions → Behaviours → Assumptions → Conditions
The visible failure is only the end of the chain.
If customer commitments repeatedly exceed capacity, the answer might appear to be better planning.
But why were those commitments made?
Perhaps executives consistently prioritise revenue certainty over delivery uncertainty.
Why?
Perhaps challenging an aggressive target is interpreted as insufficient ambition.
Why?
Perhaps the organisation has created conditions in which optimism is rewarded immediately while its consequences arrive elsewhere months later.
Now the problem looks different.
And so does the solution.
RoboCop Eventually Looks Up
The crucial shift in RoboCop occurs as Murphy begins recovering his identity and understanding the system around him.
He stops being merely a mechanism responding to individual incidents.
He begins connecting them.
That distinction matters enormously for CEOs.
Recurring problems often appear as separate episodes because the circumstances change.
This quarter it is capacity.
Last quarter it was poor forecasting.
Before that it was supplier performance.
Before that it was unclear accountability.
Different incident. Different explanation. Different fix.
But place the episodes beside one another and something else may become visible.
The recurring problem may be telling you what every attempted solution has failed to change.
That is the evidence worth examining.
Do Not Build a Better RoboCop
The leadership lesson is not that technology, governance, accountability or process improvement are misguided.
They can be extremely valuable.
The danger begins when increasingly sophisticated interventions allow the organisation to tolerate the conditions continually creating the need for them.
That is expensive karamawari.
More technology.
More governance.
More remediation.
More management attention.
More effort.
And another recurrence.
Eventually, the CEO's job is not to demand a more powerful response to the next manifestation.
It is to question why the organisation keeps needing one.
If your organisation has become extraordinarily good at fighting the same problem, what hidden Directive 4 might be preventing it from eliminating the problem altogether?
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