When the same organisational problem keeps returning, asking people to try harder may actually strengthen the conditions that keep bringing it back.
For CEOs dealing with karamawari, the frustrating cycle of considerable effort producing little lasting progress, Daniel H. Pink’s Drive offers a useful perspective.
Pink’s central argument is that traditional management often overestimates the power of external incentives and underestimates intrinsic motivation. For complex, creative and cognitive work, he argues that people are particularly motivated by three things: autonomy, mastery and purpose.
That does not explain every recurring organisational problem. Far from it.
But it does raise an important question: what if some recurring problems survive because the organisation unintentionally encourages the behaviours that recreate them?
The recurring problem may be perfectly rational
Imagine a recurring operational failure.
Management wants it eliminated. Targets are established. Accountabilities are tightened. Dashboards appear. Bonuses depend on improvement.
Yet the problem returns.
The natural conclusion is that people are not taking the issue seriously enough.
Pink gives us reason to consider another possibility.
Perhaps employees are responding quite rationally to the environment management has created.
If performance measures reward short-term throughput, people may postpone preventative work.
If bonuses depend heavily on hitting quarterly numbers, managers may tolerate risks whose consequences will appear later.
If failure is punished, people may become reluctant to experiment with unfamiliar solutions.
The behaviour may look dysfunctional from the CEO’s office while making perfect sense from the employee’s desk.
That distinction matters enormously when tackling karamawari.
Autonomy: Who is allowed to solve the problem?
One of Pink’s three elements is autonomy, the desire to have meaningful control over how we work.
Recurring problems frequently sit closest to people who have the least authority to change the conditions producing them.
They see the workaround.
They know which approval creates the delay.
They know which customer complaint keeps returning.
They know which process everyone quietly ignores.
But they may not control the process, budget, technology, policy or decision rights necessary to change it.
Management then asks employees to “take ownership” while retaining the authority required to do so.
That creates a peculiar organisational contradiction: accountability without agency.
For CEOs, the useful question from Drive is not simply whether employees have autonomy. It is whether the people with the best understanding of a recurring problem have sufficient autonomy to challenge and change its underlying conditions.
Mastery: Repetition is not necessarily learning
Pink also emphasises mastery, our desire to become increasingly capable at something meaningful.
Organisations dealing with recurring problems can confuse experience with mastery.
A team may have handled the same problem 50 times.
That does not necessarily mean it has become better at preventing it.
In fact, something more dangerous may have happened.
The organisation may have become exceptionally good at recovering from the problem.
People develop workarounds. Managers become skilled escalators. Teams learn how to placate angry customers. Finance becomes efficient at approving remediation expenditure.
The organisation acquires mastery in managing the consequence rather than eliminating the cause.
This is classic karamawari: capability increases while progress does not.
CEOs therefore need to ask what capability is actually being developed. Are people becoming better at making the problem disappear temporarily, or better at understanding why it keeps returning?
Purpose: What are people really optimising for?
Purpose is perhaps the most interesting connection between Drive and recurring problems.
Organisations usually have an official purpose for an initiative.
Improve customer experience.
Reduce risk.
Increase reliability.
Simplify operations.
But employees operate within multiple competing purposes.
A manager may supposedly be reducing operational risk while also being expected to cut costs, avoid delays, protect quarterly performance and deliver a transformation milestone.
When those objectives conflict, the formal purpose does not automatically win.
People make trade-offs.
And those trade-offs can become the seeds of recurrence.
This is why understanding a recurring problem requires examining not merely what decision was made, but why that decision made sense at the time.
What was the person trying to achieve?
What pressure were they responding to?
What consequence were they avoiding?
What did the organisation implicitly tell them mattered most?
Purpose becomes particularly powerful when we examine the gap between what leadership says matters and what organisational conditions demonstrate matters.
Where Drive stops
There is also an important limitation.
Autonomy, mastery and purpose cannot explain every persistent organisational problem.
Karamawari can arise from structural constraints, conflicting decision rights, historical assumptions, poor information, incentives, resource limitations, governance, technology, competing priorities and deeply embedded beliefs.
A highly motivated workforce can therefore reproduce the same problem indefinitely.
In fact, highly capable and motivated people can sometimes sustain karamawari longer because they become extraordinarily effective at compensating for a dysfunctional system.
That is why Drive should be treated as a lens, not a diagnosis.
Stop asking why people will not fix it
When a costly problem keeps returning, leadership naturally focuses on the visible failure.
A more revealing investigation moves backwards.
Look at the decisions repeatedly producing the outcome. Examine the behaviours surrounding those decisions. Then investigate the assumptions and organisational conditions making those behaviours reasonable.
Pink adds three valuable questions to that investigation:
Where did people lack meaningful autonomy?
What were they becoming better at doing?
What purpose were their decisions actually serving?
Those questions will not solve karamawari by themselves.
But they may reveal something uncomfortable and commercially important.
If your people keep recreating a problem you desperately want eliminated, what if they are not resisting the organisation’s priorities at all, but responding perfectly to the ones your organisation actually rewards?
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