The most dangerous recurring problem in your organisation may be the one your leadership team has become exceptionally good at solving.
Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life is not a book about recurring organisational problems.
But many of its ideas point towards something CEOs dealing with them need to understand: outcomes rarely change sustainably until you understand the forces producing them.
That sits remarkably close to the idea behind karamawari (空回り): spinning without engaging, or enormous effort producing surprisingly little traction.
When the same expensive problem keeps returning, more effort may not be the answer.
Better diagnosis might be.
Stop treating the symptom as the problem
One of Bartlett’s recurring themes is that human behaviour makes more sense when you understand the forces beneath it.
That matters enormously inside organisations.
A CEO sees poor accountability.
A manager sees unclear authority.
A CEO sees resistance to change.
Employees see another transformation likely to disappear in twelve months.
A CEO sees people circumventing governance.
Employees see a process that makes serving the customer almost impossible.
Attack the visible behaviour and you may temporarily suppress it.
Understand what makes that behaviour rational and you have somewhere very different to intervene.
This is classic karamawari.
The organisation keeps solving what it can see while leaving untouched what keeps recreating it.
Your organisation is a system
Another useful idea running through Bartlett’s book is that inputs and systems matter enormously to outcomes.
Businesses frequently forget this when something goes wrong.
A project misses its deadline, so the project manager is replaced.
Customer complaints rise, so service training is introduced.
A control fails, so another approval is added.
Employees leave, so HR launches a retention initiative.
Each intervention can be perfectly reasonable.
But imagine all four problems are being created by the same condition: decision-making has become concentrated among a handful of executives.
Projects wait for decisions.
Customers wait for approvals.
Employees become frustrated.
People circumvent controls because formal pathways take too long.
Four problems.
Four remediation programmes.
One condition.
The organisation can spend millions fixing each manifestation while the machine generating them remains untouched.
Pressure can strengthen the problem
Bartlett also spends considerable time examining psychological forces, incentives and behaviour.
This should make CEOs uncomfortable because many traditional leadership responses alter precisely those conditions.
When performance deteriorates, pressure increases.
More reporting.
More meetings.
More targets.
More escalation.
More executive involvement.
Yet pressure changes behaviour.
People become more defensive. Bad news becomes harder to surface. Forecasts become more optimistic. Decisions move upwards. Employees optimise for satisfying the governance process rather than achieving the underlying outcome.
Leadership then sees insufficient ownership and introduces even more oversight.
The intervention has started creating evidence that appears to justify the intervention.
The wheel spins faster.
Traction declines.
Beware the story you tell yourself
A particularly valuable lesson from Diary of a CEO concerns beliefs and narratives.
Organisations have them too.
"This team lacks accountability."
"Customers are too demanding."
"Our people don't like change."
"The technology is the problem."
"We just need better execution."
Once established, these explanations influence what leaders notice.
Evidence supporting the story becomes highly visible. Evidence challenging it becomes easier to dismiss.
That matters when problems recur.
If leadership believes execution is the problem, every recurrence produces another execution initiative.
New governance.
New methodology.
New leadership.
New technology.
New KPIs.
Eventually the organisation may have accumulated years of evidence that its execution interventions don't permanently work, while remaining remarkably committed to the belief that execution is the problem.
Sometimes recurrence is evidence that the diagnosis itself deserves investigation.
Ask why the previous solution made sense
There is another important lesson CEOs can take from Bartlett's emphasis on understanding behaviour rather than merely judging it.
When examining a failed solution, don't begin with:
"Who got this wrong?"
Ask:
"Why did this decision make sense at the time?"
That question is far more revealing.
Perhaps executives acted on incomplete information.
Perhaps incentives favoured speed over resilience.
Perhaps challenging the consensus carried career risk.
Perhaps authority sat somewhere different from expertise.
Perhaps previous success made the risk appear acceptable.
Now you are investigating conditions rather than judging people with hindsight.
That distinction matters because replacing the decision-maker while preserving the conditions can simply produce another capable person who eventually makes a remarkably similar decision.
Recurrence is evidence
CEOs understandably become frustrated when problems return.
But recurrence contains valuable information.
It tells you something survived the previous solution.
The process changed, but perhaps the incentive didn't.
The technology changed, but the assumptions didn't.
The structure changed, but decision rights remained ambiguous.
The people changed, but information still couldn't reach those able to act on it.
The control changed, but circumventing it remained the easiest way to get work done.
That is why the most interesting question after a problem returns isn't:
"What else should we do?"
It is:
"What didn't we change last time?"
That question turns recurrence from frustration into evidence.
Stop spinning the wheel faster
The broader lesson from The Diary of a CEO isn't that there is a simple formula for eliminating recurring problems.
There isn't.
It is that behaviour, incentives, beliefs, systems and conditions matter, often far more than the visible event that finally attracts leadership attention.
Karamawari begins when organisations confuse activity with progress.
Another transformation can feel like progress.
Another control can feel like progress.
Another restructure can feel like progress.
Another technology implementation can feel like progress.
Sometimes they are.
But when the problem keeps returning, the organisation should become less interested in finding another answer and more interested in discovering why its previous answers failed to hold.
So if your organisation has solved the same problem three times and it has returned for a fourth, what if the recurring problem is no longer the most important thing to investigate, and the real problem is why your organisation keeps believing the same kind of solution will finally make it disappear?
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