Few things create more expensive Karamawari than confidently solving your problem with an answer designed for somebody else’s.
A recurring problem refuses to disappear.
Leadership is frustrated. Previous interventions have delivered disappointing results. The board wants confidence that the next attempt will work.
Then someone finds an organisation that appears to have solved it.
"They centralised the function."
"They outsourced it."
"They moved to agile."
"They automated the process."
"They introduced this operating model."
"They use this technology."
Suddenly there is a proven solution.
It feels safer than starting from first principles. There is evidence. There is precedent. Perhaps there is even an impressive case study.
So the organisation borrows the playbook.
The danger is that it may also borrow an answer to a question it never had.
Best Practice Usually Arrives Without Its Conditions
When executives study successful organisations, they naturally focus on what those organisations did.
That is the visible part.
The less visible part is everything that made the intervention appropriate.
What conditions existed beforehand?
What behaviours were causing the problem?
What capabilities were already present?
How were decisions made?
What incentives shaped behaviour?
What constraints existed?
What exactly was the organisation trying to solve?
Two organisations can display almost identical symptoms while those symptoms are being produced by completely different conditions.
Both might have slow decision-making.
One suffers because decision rights are unclear.
Another because executives repeatedly override delegated decisions.
Centralising authority might help the first.
Apply the same solution to the second and you may make it worse.
The Symptom Creates a False Match
This is particularly dangerous with recurring problems.
Imagine two companies experiencing repeated project delays.
Company A discovers that project teams lack consistent delivery disciplines. It standardises project management, introduces common controls and improves performance dramatically.
Company B sees the success.
It has project delays too.
So it adopts the same methodology.
More reporting appears.
Stage gates are introduced.
Governance increases.
Project managers receive training.
Yet projects continue slipping.
Why?
Perhaps Company B's real problem was never project management.
Perhaps Sales commits to dates before Delivery assesses capacity.
Perhaps executives continuously introduce new priorities without stopping existing work.
Perhaps people know deadlines are unrealistic but challenging them carries career risk.
Company B has just added excellent project governance around a condition that continues producing impossible commitments.
The solution has become another workaround.
This Is How Karamawari Gets More Sophisticated
空回り, karamawari, describes effort that fails to translate into meaningful forward movement.
Borrowed solutions are particularly good at producing it because they arrive with credibility.
Leadership commits.
Consultants are engaged.
Technology is purchased.
People are trained.
Processes are redesigned.
Dashboards appear.
The organisation becomes visibly different.
That visibility can easily be mistaken for progress.
But underneath the new operating model, the original condition may remain completely untouched.
Now something worse has happened.
The organisation has added another layer of activity around the recurring problem.
When the problem returns, people must operate both the original workaround and the new solution.
Cost compounds.
"Who Else Has Solved This?" Is the Wrong First Question
Benchmarking has value.
External examples can challenge assumptions and reveal possibilities an organisation has not considered.
But benchmarking becomes dangerous when leaders move directly from:
"They achieved the outcome we want"
to:
"Therefore we should do what they did."
There is a missing diagnostic step.
The better questions are:
What problem were they actually solving?
What conditions were creating it?
Are those conditions genuinely present here?
Only then does the external solution become meaningful evidence.
Otherwise, benchmarking can become organisational imitation dressed as analysis.
Your Previous Solutions Contain Clues
There is another way CEOs can protect themselves from this trap.
Before adopting the next external playbook, examine the solutions already attempted internally.
Put them beside one another.
A restructure.
A new platform.
A transformation.
An outsourcing arrangement.
A governance programme.
A new executive.
Ask what each changed.
Then ask what every one of them left untouched.
If five very different solutions have failed while the same condition survived all five, that condition deserves considerably more attention than the sixth fashionable solution.
Perhaps accountability changed repeatedly while incentives did not.
Perhaps processes changed while unrealistic commitments continued.
Perhaps structures changed while decision authority remained ambiguous.
The recurring problem may be telling you exactly where not to look.
Borrow Principles, Not Prescriptions
The strongest organisations still learn from others.
But they borrow differently.
They examine the logic behind the solution rather than simply copying its form.
Why did centralisation work there?
Why did automation improve performance?
Why did removing management layers accelerate decisions?
Why did outsourcing reduce cost?
What changed in the conditions?
Then they test whether the same causal logic exists inside their own organisation.
That turns benchmarking from imitation into diagnosis.
The distinction matters enormously when recurring problems are already expensive.
A CEO does not need another intervention that looks credible, generates activity and produces six months of optimism.
They need confidence that the intervention touches something capable of recreating the problem.
Because another organisation's success proves only that its solution worked there.
It does not prove that you have the same problem.
Before borrowing someone else's successful playbook, what if the most important question is not whether their solution worked, but whether your problem was ever the same as theirs?
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