Your recurring problem may not be surviving because nobody can solve it. It may be surviving because something inside your organisation is quietly helping it stay alive.
That is an uncomfortable possibility for any CEO who has spent millions trying to eliminate the same problem.
The process has been redesigned.
The technology has been replaced.
People have been trained.
Controls have been strengthened.
Accountability has been clarified.
And yet, eventually, the problem returns.
Perhaps the investigation has been asking the wrong question.
Instead of asking only “What causes this problem?”, ask:
“What makes it possible for this problem to keep surviving?”
That small change can take you somewhere completely different.
Problems need somewhere to live
Persistent organisational problems rarely exist in isolation.
Something creates conditions in which they can survive.
An incentive.
A workaround.
An assumption.
A fear.
An information gap.
A competing objective.
An ambiguous decision right.
A management response.
Consider a business struggling with employees bypassing an important control.
The obvious problem is non-compliance.
Leadership responds predictably: strengthen the control, increase monitoring, retrain employees and introduce consequences.
But suppose the control adds three days to a process while customers expect an answer within hours.
Now the problem has an accomplice.
Employees may not be bypassing the control because they disregard governance. They may be trying to satisfy another expectation the organisation has simultaneously placed upon them.
Fix the behaviour without resolving that conflict and the organisation may simply create increasingly sophisticated workarounds.
Workarounds are particularly effective accomplices
Workarounds are fascinating because they often begin as solutions.
A system is unreliable, so someone creates a spreadsheet.
An approval takes too long, so employees learn who to call directly.
A handoff regularly fails, so an experienced manager checks everything personally.
A report contains unreliable information, so an analyst manually reconciles it every month.
Problem solved.
Except it isn't.
The workaround absorbs the consequence without changing the condition.
Eventually the organisation forgets that the workaround exists.
The spreadsheet becomes part of the process. The phone call becomes institutional knowledge. The manager becomes indispensable. The reconciliation becomes someone's monthly responsibility.
The original weakness survives because somebody has become extraordinarily good at compensating for it.
That is karamawari (空回り): tremendous activity without equivalent traction.
Sometimes the organisation's best people are inadvertently helping its worst problems survive.
Success can protect recurrence
There is an even more counterintuitive accomplice: previous success.
Imagine a project repeatedly requiring heroic intervention during its final months.
Senior executives step in.
Additional resources are deployed.
Decisions are accelerated.
People work extraordinary hours.
The deadline is eventually met.
Leadership congratulates everyone.
What has the organisation learned?
Possibly that its delivery model works.
But perhaps the real lesson was that the delivery model only works when extraordinary intervention compensates for weaknesses built into it.
Success has concealed failure.
Next year, another programme follows the same pattern.
Another rescue occurs.
Another deadline is recovered.
Another celebration follows.
Eventually heroics become part of the operating model.
The recurring problem now has an extremely powerful accomplice: the organisation's ability to survive it.
Management can become the accomplice
This is where the question becomes particularly uncomfortable for executives.
Sometimes the leadership response helps preserve the very problem leadership wants eliminated.
A problem occurs.
Management increases oversight.
Employees become cautious and escalate more decisions.
Decision-making slows.
Executives see insufficient accountability.
They increase oversight again.
The intervention creates behaviour that appears to confirm the original diagnosis.
Or perhaps bad news reaches leadership too late.
Executives demand better reporting.
Teams become increasingly conscious of how information will be received.
Reports become polished.
Uncertainty disappears.
Bad news arrives even later.
Nobody intended to make the problem worse.
Every individual action may have been reasonable.
Yet collectively, the organisation has created conditions that protect recurrence.
Find the accomplice, not another culprit
This requires a different style of investigation.
When the problem returns, resist beginning with who failed.
Instead ask what allowed recurrence to remain economically, politically or operationally rational.
What incentive rewards the behaviour?
What consequence makes the alternative unattractive?
What workaround prevents the full impact becoming visible?
What assumption remains unquestioned?
What information cannot reach the person able to act?
What competing objective makes apparently undesirable behaviour sensible?
What management response inadvertently reinforces it?
You are looking beyond the triggering event towards the environment in which recurrence survives.
That distinction matters.
Remove an individual and the condition can remain.
Change the technology and the condition can remain.
Rewrite the process and the condition can remain.
Add another control and the condition can remain.
The cast changes.
The accomplice stays.
Stop solving the crime scene
CEOs understandably become frustrated when problems return.
But recurrence is information.
It tells you that something survived the previous solution.
The most valuable investigation may therefore begin after everyone thinks the problem has already been explained.
Not simply:
What caused this?
But:
What protected it?
What absorbed its consequences?
What made the behaviour rational?
What prevented earlier solutions from holding?
What continues to give the problem somewhere to live?
Because eliminating a recurring problem often requires more than removing its immediate cause.
It requires removing the conditions that keep giving it another chance.
So if your organisation has already “solved” the same expensive problem several times, perhaps the next investigation shouldn't begin with the problem at all. It should begin by asking: who, or what, has been quietly keeping it alive?
0 Comments