Thinking for leaders dealing with persistent problems
Karamawari writes about the organisational patterns that make recurring problems difficult to see and expensive to leave unresolved: how evidence becomes representation, why reasonable fixes fail, where capacity disappears and what leaders can learn when the same outcome keeps returning.
The Five Whys Can Give You Five Wrong Answers
A problem-solving tool becomes dangerous when its simplicity creates more confidence than the evidence deserves. The Five Whys is one of the most appealing tools in management. A problem occurs. Ask...
When More Pressure Makes the Problem Worse
Some recurring problems survive not because leaders haven't pushed hard enough, but because every additional push gives the organisation another reason to push back. Aesop understood this more than...
The Most Expensive Sentence in Business: “We’ve Fixed It”
A recurring problem is often at its most dangerous just after everyone becomes convinced it has been solved. The complaints have stopped. The numbers have recovered. The backlog has disappeared. The...
Your KPIs Are Telling You What Already Happened
If your leadership team first discovers a serious problem when a KPI turns red, the problem did not just arrive. Your organisation arrived late. Most organisations rely heavily on KPIs and OKRs to...
Hit Refresh: Why Recurring Problems Sometimes Require the Organisation to Change
When the same costly problem survives multiple competent attempts to solve it, the next solution may matter less than the organisation attempting to implement it. Satya Nadella’s Hit...
The Alien Wasn’t the Real Problem
The most expensive recurring problems are often the ones leadership keeps fighting at the point where they finally become visible. Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien is remembered as a story...
