When an organisation has spent millions solving the same problem repeatedly, the question is no longer why the latest solution failed. It is why everyone keeps believing they are solving the right problem.
Simon Sinek’s Start With Why is not a book about recurring organisational problems. Nor does its Golden Circle provide everything required to diagnose 空回り (karamawari), where substantial effort repeatedly fails to produce corresponding progress.
But one of Sinek’s central ideas is remarkably useful for CEOs confronting problems that refuse to die: we have a tendency to concentrate on what we do and how we do it without examining the deeper why.
Applied carefully, that can change how we think about recurrence.
Recurring problems attract WHAT solutions
A customer problem appears.
Improve the customer-service process.
Costs increase.
Launch a cost-reduction programme.
Projects repeatedly miss deadlines.
Strengthen project governance.
Accountability is unclear.
Restructure.
Information is fragmented.
Implement new technology.
These are all WHATs.
And frequently they are perfectly reasonable responses to the problem as leadership currently understands it.
The difficulty is that visible problems naturally attract visible solutions.
If a project is late, project delivery appears to be the problem. If costs are high, cost appears to be the problem.
So organisations become increasingly sophisticated at treating what they can see.
That works beautifully when the visible problem actually is the problem.
Karamawari begins when it isn't.
Then organisations improve the HOW
When the first intervention disappoints, leadership often moves inward one level.
Perhaps the solution was right but its execution was poor.
So attention moves to HOW.
Better governance.
Clearer accountability.
Different processes.
More capable people.
New methodologies.
Additional controls.
Better technology.
More frequent reporting.
This can create a particularly expensive trap because the organisation is no longer merely doing something. It is getting better at doing it.
Consider a business experiencing recurring margin erosion.
Leadership introduces tighter cost controls.
Margins recover temporarily and then deteriorate again.
The response?
More sophisticated cost management.
But suppose the underlying problem is that sales incentives encourage commercially unattractive revenue.
The organisation may become extraordinarily competent at removing costs created by decisions it continues incentivising people to make.
That is karamawari with a productivity programme attached.
The useful WHY is not your purpose statement
Here we need to adapt Sinek’s idea rather than apply it literally.
For Sinek, WHY is strongly associated with purpose, cause and belief.
For recurring-problem diagnosis, CEOs need a different but related WHY:
Why did the behaviours and decisions producing this outcome make sense at the time?
That question takes us somewhere conventional root-cause analysis can miss.
Why was an unrealistic commitment made?
Why wasn't the risk escalated?
Why did managers work around the process?
Why was investment repeatedly deferred?
Why did nobody challenge the assumption?
The interesting answers are rarely “because people wanted the project to fail.”
The decisions usually made sense somehow.
Understanding why they made sense is the doorway to understanding recurrence.
Behind the WHY are conditions
This is also where Start With Why stops being enough.
Organisational behaviour cannot always be explained through purpose or belief alone.
We need to examine the conditions producing those beliefs.
Imagine executives repeatedly failing to escalate problems early.
Leadership might conclude:
“They need to take more accountability.”
But ask why they don't escalate.
Perhaps managers believe reporting problems damages their credibility.
Why would intelligent people believe that?
Because they have watched executives interrogate messengers rather than problems.
Now we have moved through the chain:
Conditions → Assumptions → Behaviours → Decisions → Impacts
The impact is late intervention.
The decision was not to escalate.
The behaviour was concealment or attempted local recovery.
The assumption was that escalation carried personal downside.
The condition was leadership's historical response to bad news.
Changing the escalation procedure addresses the WHAT.
Changing the reporting process addresses the HOW.
Changing the condition begins addressing why the problem can reproduce itself.
Repeated HOWs can make the problem more expensive
There is another reason this matters to CEOs.
Every unsuccessful intervention can add cost and complexity.
A new governance layer remains.
A workaround becomes permanent.
Another system gets integrated.
Additional reporting continues.
People are hired to administer the intervention.
Management attention becomes institutionalised around controlling the symptom.
The organisation gradually builds infrastructure around a problem it has never actually understood.
Eventually the recurring problem is expensive.
But so is removing everything built to manage it.
The organisation has not merely failed to solve the problem. It has invested in its continued existence.
Start with WHY, then keep going
The enduring value of Sinek’s framework here is not that asking WHY magically reveals root causes.
It doesn't.
Its value is that it challenges the instinct to begin with WHAT.
For CEOs exhausted by recurring problems, that interruption can be enormously valuable.
Before approving the next system, restructure, programme, control, consultant or transformation, stop.
Ask why the previous decisions made sense.
Ask what people believed.
Ask what taught them to believe it.
Ask whether those conditions still exist.
Then ask whether the proposed solution changes any of them.
Because another WHAT may produce another temporary improvement.
A better HOW may make the workaround more efficient.
But neither necessarily changes the organisation's capacity to recreate the problem.
If your organisation has solved the same expensive problem three times already, what might you discover if, before funding solution number four, you finally asked why the problem keeps making sense to the organisation that creates it?
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