Some recurring business problems survive not because the organisation cannot solve them, but because it has become extraordinarily good at recreating them.
That is an uncomfortable idea for a CEO.
The problem has been investigated. Actions have been agreed. Processes have changed. Perhaps technology has been implemented, people replaced or reporting strengthened.
Things improve.
Then the problem returns.
This is 空回り (karamawari): considerable effort without corresponding progress.
James Clear’s Atomic Habits is not a methodology for solving complex organisational problems. It was written primarily about individual behaviour and habit formation. But several ideas within it become surprisingly powerful when applied to organisations struggling with costly recurring problems.
The most important may be this: stop looking only at the outcome you dislike and examine the system repeatedly producing it.
You do not rise to the level of your intentions
One of Clear’s central arguments is that goals describe the results we want, while systems determine the results we repeatedly get.
Businesses are full of goals.
Reduce customer complaints.
Improve margins.
Deliver projects on time.
Reduce incidents.
Increase accountability.
The difficulty is that an organisation can sincerely want one outcome while operating a system that repeatedly produces another.
A CEO might demand earlier escalation while managers have learned that bringing bad news upwards attracts scrutiny.
Leadership might demand collaboration while incentives reward individual business-unit performance.
The board might demand better risk management while simultaneously rewarding executives for aggressive short-term results.
The stated goal and the operating conditions are pointing in opposite directions.
When that happens, another exhortation to achieve the goal is unlikely to change much.
Recurring problems have organisational cues
Clear describes habits as involving a repeating cycle of cue, craving, response and reward.
The organisational equivalent deserves attention.
Imagine a project beginning to fall behind.
That is the cue.
A manager anticipates the consequences of reporting the problem.
They want to preserve confidence in themselves and their team.
So the response is to delay escalation while attempting recovery.
If the team catches up, the manager avoids an uncomfortable conversation. Even if it does not, they have postponed it.
That is the reward.
Repeat this often enough and late escalation stops looking like an isolated behavioural failure. It becomes an organisational habit.
Replacing the manager may therefore achieve remarkably little if the next manager encounters exactly the same cues, pressures and rewards.
The environment may be stronger than the policy
Another useful idea from Atomic Habits is the importance of environment.
We often think behaviour changes because people decide to behave differently. Clear places much greater emphasis on designing environments that make desirable behaviours easier and undesirable ones harder.
That matters enormously inside companies.
Organisations frequently respond to behavioural problems by telling people what they should do.
Speak up.
Take accountability.
Collaborate.
Escalate early.
Think long term.
But employees are continuously reading their environment for evidence about what actually succeeds.
Who gets promoted?
What happens when someone challenges the CEO?
Which targets receive the most attention?
Who controls resources?
What happens to someone who admits uncertainty?
Which problems attract blame?
Those conditions may teach people far more effectively than any leadership programme.
If you want different behaviour, examine what the organisation is making easy, difficult, rewarding and dangerous.
Small compromises can compound too
Perhaps the most commercially relevant lesson from Atomic Habits is compounding.
Small positive behaviours can accumulate into substantial improvements.
Unfortunately, the reverse is also true.
A workaround seems insignificant.
One additional approval appears harmless.
A spreadsheet compensates for a system weakness.
A manager personally intervenes to rescue a failing process.
An exception is made to hit this quarter’s number.
Individually, each decision may be entirely rational.
But recurring problems frequently grow through accumulation rather than catastrophe.
Yesterday’s workaround becomes today’s process. Today’s process becomes tomorrow’s dependency. Eventually, people, systems, budgets and expectations have formed around something nobody originally intended to preserve.
The organisation has effectively habitualised the problem.
But Atomic Habits only takes us so far
This distinction is important.
A recurring organisational problem is rarely just a collection of bad habits.
Power matters.
Incentives matter.
Authority matters.
Competing objectives matter.
History matters.
Assumptions matter.
People may continue apparently dysfunctional behaviours because those behaviours are entirely rational within the conditions leadership has created.
That is why fixing karamawari requires going deeper.
The useful chain is:
Conditions → Assumptions → Behaviours → Decisions → Impacts
Atomic Habits is particularly useful in helping us think about the middle of that chain: how environments reinforce behaviours, how repetition embeds them and how seemingly insignificant actions compound.
But CEOs still need to ask what created those conditions and why they persist.
Stop treating recurrence as coincidence
When the same problem returns, the instinct is often to ask why the previous solution failed.
There is a better question:
What is the organisation repeatedly doing that makes this outcome predictable?
Look for the cue.
Look for the response.
Look for the reward.
Then look deeper at the organisational conditions making that response sensible.
Because the recurring problem may be only the visible output of a system that has practised producing it thousands of times.
And perhaps that is the most useful lesson Atomic Habits offers CEOs dealing with karamawari:
If your organisation keeps experiencing the same expensive problem, what has it inadvertently become exceptionally good at doing that keeps producing it?
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