When the same expensive problem keeps returning, the organisation may not need a better solution. It may be missing an element without which no solution can work.
Luc Besson’s 1997 film The Fifth Element is hardly a conventional management textbook. Flying taxis, intergalactic villains and an orange-haired supreme being rarely feature in MBA curricula.
Yet underneath the spectacle sits an intriguing idea for CEOs dealing with karamawari: having most of what you need is not the same as having what you need.
And that distinction can become extraordinarily expensive.
Four out of five is still failure
At the centre of The Fifth Element are four stones representing earth, air, fire and water.
They matter enormously. But they are insufficient.
The fifth element, Leeloo, is required to make the entire system work.
Without her, possessing the other four elements creates the appearance of readiness without the capability to produce the required outcome.
Organisations do this surprisingly often with recurring problems.
They assemble technology, processes, policies, consultants, restructures, training, dashboards and governance. Each intervention may be perfectly sensible. Considerable money gets spent.
Yet the problem returns.
Management's instinct is often to conclude that one of the components wasn't good enough.
Perhaps the technology needs upgrading.
Perhaps the process needs redesigning.
Perhaps people need more training.
Perhaps another transformation is required.
But what if the organisation already has four perfectly good elements and simply hasn't discovered the fifth?
Stop asking what failed
Recurring problems encourage leaders to examine the latest unsuccessful solution.
That is understandable, but potentially misleading.
Imagine repeated customer complaints following several attempts at process improvement. Management might examine whether the new process was properly implemented.
But perhaps the process isn't the missing element.
Perhaps employees are rewarded for throughput rather than customer outcomes.
Perhaps decision rights are unclear.
Perhaps people have learned that escalating bad news damages careers.
Perhaps managers believe intervention signals weakness, so problems are allowed to develop.
Perhaps teams have become accustomed to working around an underlying constraint rather than challenging it.
The useful question therefore changes from:
"Why didn't our solution work?"
to:
"What would have to be present for this solution to work that isn't present today?"
That question opens a very different investigation.
The missing element may be invisible
This is where The Fifth Element becomes particularly relevant to karamawari.
Organisations naturally gravitate towards visible things.
Systems can be replaced. Processes can be mapped. Structures can be redesigned. Roles can be changed. Policies can be rewritten.
But the conditions producing recurring problems are frequently less visible.
Authority.
Incentives.
Assumptions.
Fear.
Status.
Trust.
Information flows.
Unspoken rules.
Beliefs about what senior management actually values.
These don't appear neatly on an organisational chart or transformation dashboard, yet they can determine how people behave and therefore which decisions get made.
A company can spend millions improving its visible machinery while leaving untouched the invisible conditions repeatedly producing the unwanted outcome.
The machinery changes.
The behaviour doesn't.
The problem returns.
The elements must work together
There is another useful lesson in the film.
The five elements aren't five independent solutions. Their value comes from their interaction.
That matters because recurring organisational problems are frequently treated as if there must be one root cause.
Reality can be less convenient.
Imagine persistent project overruns.
Poor planning may contribute. But planning could interact with unrealistic executive expectations, reluctance to challenge commitments, incentives favouring optimistic forecasts and governance that discovers problems too late.
Remove any one factor and performance might improve.
Change the combination and recurrence might stop.
This is why replacing the project methodology alone can disappoint. The methodology wasn't necessarily wrong. It simply existed inside conditions capable of defeating it.
Karamawari often survives because organisations keep replacing individual components while preserving the relationships between them.
Don't confuse activity with completeness
CEOs should be particularly wary when an organisation can produce a long list of actions taken against a recurring problem.
A substantial remediation programme can create psychological comfort.
Thirty-seven actions completed.
New system implemented.
Governance committee established.
Training delivered.
Consultants engaged.
Dashboard operational.
Everything appears to be happening.
But The Fifth Element offers a useful challenge: what if the number of things you've done tells you nothing about whether you've assembled the things that actually matter?
Completeness should not be measured by actions completed.
It should be measured by whether the conditions capable of recreating the problem have changed.
Sometimes the final element changes everything
There is an important limitation to the analogy.
Complex organisations rarely have one magical fifth element. Persistent problems usually emerge from interacting conditions, assumptions, behaviours and decisions.
So The Fifth Element doesn't provide a methodology for solving karamawari.
It provides something potentially more useful at the beginning: a different question.
When repeated interventions have failed, resist immediately searching for a better version of the previous intervention.
Instead, inventory what is already present.
Then search deliberately for what is absent.
The missing element could be decision authority. Psychological safety. Commercial alignment. Better information. A challenged assumption. Different incentives. Leadership behaviour. Or a condition nobody has previously considered relevant.
And sometimes that seemingly insignificant missing element explains why millions of dollars' worth of perfectly sensible interventions have produced remarkably little lasting change.
If your organisation has already tried almost everything to solve its recurring problem, what if the breakthrough isn't doing something better, but discovering the one thing everyone has forgotten to look for?
0 Comments