The costliest recurring problems survive because organisations keep treating the strange behaviour they can see while ignoring the powerful signal underneath it.
Steven Spielberg's 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind looks, on the surface, like a story about humanity encountering extraterrestrial life.
For CEOs wrestling with problems that keep returning despite restructures, new systems, new leaders and repeated remediation, it offers something more useful.
It is a story about signals, interpretation and the danger of dismissing something simply because the organisation cannot yet explain it.
That makes it surprisingly relevant to karamawari, 空回り: enormous effort that produces little forward progress.
When the evidence doesn't fit the explanation
Roy Neary's encounter begins with events that make little sense.
Lights appear. Electrical systems behave strangely. Objects move. Aircraft reported missing decades earlier inexplicably reappear. People experience things they struggle to explain.
The temptation is to treat each event separately.
Organisations do this constantly.
A customer escalates.
A project slips.
A control fails.
Costs rise unexpectedly.
A key employee leaves.
Operations creates another workaround.
Each incident receives a plausible local explanation. Capacity. Communication. Training. Poor execution. Changing requirements. Human error.
And each explanation may be partly correct.
The problem begins when those explanations prevent anyone asking why apparently different events keep pointing in the same direction.
Recurrence is not noise
After his encounter, Roy becomes obsessed with a shape he cannot identify.
He draws it. Sculpts it. Sees it everywhere.
To everyone around him, his behaviour looks increasingly irrational.
But something important is happening beneath the apparent madness.
He has detected a pattern before he understands what the pattern means.
That distinction matters enormously inside organisations.
The people closest to recurring problems frequently recognise something before they can articulate it.
"This keeps happening."
"Something doesn't feel right."
"We fixed this last year."
"Different customer, same problem."
"We always seem to end up here."
Those observations can be dismissed because they lack the analytical neatness leadership expects.
But pattern recognition often precedes explanation.
The absence of a compelling explanation does not make the pattern meaningless.
Be careful what you label irrational
Roy's behaviour becomes disruptive because he cannot reconcile what he knows he experienced with the explanations available to him.
Organisations produce their own version of this tension.
A frontline employee repeatedly raises a concern but cannot quantify the enterprise impact.
A project manager challenges an apparently reasonable deadline.
An operational leader resists another sales commitment.
Risk questions an exception everyone else considers commercially necessary.
From the executive suite, these behaviours can look obstructive, negative or resistant to change.
But what if they are signals?
One of the most dangerous mistakes leadership can make is diagnosing the behaviour before understanding the conditions producing it.
The question is not merely, "Why is this person being difficult?"
It is, "What might they be responding to that we cannot yet see?"
The breakthrough comes when the fragments connect
Eventually Roy discovers that the mysterious shape haunting him is Devils Tower in Wyoming.
Suddenly, disconnected pieces acquire meaning.
That is the breakthrough many organisations never achieve with recurring problems.
Finance sees cost.
Operations sees rework.
Customers see inconsistency.
Projects see dependencies.
Risk sees exceptions.
Employees see frustration.
Leadership sees disappointing performance.
Everyone possesses evidence.
Nobody necessarily possesses the pattern.
So each function responds responsibly to its fragment.
Costs are explained. Workarounds are introduced. Complaints are resolved. Risks are accepted. Projects are replanned. People are reminded about accountability.
Activity increases.
Yet the underlying condition survives.
That is karamawari.
The organisation does not need another person working harder on another fragment. It needs someone to assemble the fragments until the shape becomes recognisable.
Sometimes leadership itself creates the fog
There is another uncomfortable lesson in Close Encounters.
Authorities know more than the public and deliberately construct an alternative explanation to keep people away from Devils Tower.
For CEOs, the parallel is not necessarily deception. It is information compression.
As information travels upward, complexity disappears.
A recurring operational problem becomes a red metric.
A customer pattern becomes a satisfaction score.
Repeated exceptions become an aggregate risk rating.
Months of workarounds become a green project status.
By the time reality reaches the executive table, the strange details that might reveal the pattern have been removed.
Leaders can therefore receive accurate reporting and still misunderstand what is happening.
Sometimes better governance does not require another dashboard.
It requires getting closer to the evidence the dashboard compressed.
Stop asking only how to fix the latest event
Persistent problems eventually become expensive precisely because organisations become exceptionally efficient at responding to them.
People know whom to call.
Exceptions have processes.
Workarounds have owners.
Budgets contain contingencies.
Management knows how to explain the variance.
The recurring problem becomes institutionalised.
The real breakthrough comes when leadership stops treating recurrence as another incident and starts treating it as evidence.
Place the last five occurrences beside one another.
Ignore their superficial differences.
Ask what each response changed.
Then ask what every response left untouched.
Perhaps the same assumption survived.
Perhaps the same incentive remained.
Perhaps commitments continued to precede capacity decisions.
Perhaps uncomfortable information continued to arrive too late.
Perhaps decision rights kept encouraging the same workaround.
The answer may initially look like Roy's mysterious shape: incomplete, strange and difficult to explain.
That does not make it irrelevant.
It may mean you have finally stopped looking at the incidents and started seeing the system producing them.
What recurring pattern in your organisation are you still dismissing as noise simply because nobody has yet recognised the shape it is trying to reveal?
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