Where Is the Strain Actually Living?

This series, Under the Visible, is about the problems most organizations can't see, the structural issues hiding underneath the visible symptoms. These issues produce the same problems over and over no matter how many times they get "fixed." Tate Linden is guiding us through through a set of questions designed to help you find them.

When something breaks down in an organization, the breakdown is almost always visible at the same place: in the work itself. A deadline gets missed. A product goes out with errors. A customer doesn't get a response. A project stalls. These are the things that show up in status reports and escalations and uncomfortable conversations with leadership. They're what people mean when they say the organization has a problem.

But the work isn't where the problem lives. It's just where the problem surfaces. By the time it shows up there, it's traveled up through multiple layers of the organization to reach you. And if you try to fix it where you can see it, at the level of the work, you're almost certainly fixing it in the wrong place.

Think about what actually has to happen for work to go well. At the base of everything, someone has to understand what's really going on in the world outside the organization, with customers, competitors, the market, whatever the relevant environment is. From that awareness, the organization builds a sense of what it's trying to achieve and what it's willing to trade off to get there. That purpose gets translated into rules, written or unwritten, that govern how decisions get made. Those rules shape the processes and tools that move the work forward. And then people actually do the work. That's five distinct layers between the outside world and the visible output, and a failure at any one of them will eventually surface as a problem at the top. But the fix for a failure in the organization's rules looks nothing like the fix for a broken process, and neither of those looks like an individual performance problem.

Here's what that looks like in practice. A services company is consistently delivering projects late. Leadership has tried the obvious fixes: better project management, clearer timelines, more frequent check-ins, improved incentives. Nothing holds. The teams are capable. The tools seem fine. So what's going on?

Watch the work closely and you'll notice that scope keeps changing mid-project. The client asks for something different than what was agreed, and the team adjusts, because the relationship matters and nobody wants to say no. The timeline slips because the work changed but the deadline didn't. Leadership sees the slip and responds with more process, more oversight, more accountability. But the process isn't the problem. The scope changes are the problem. And the scope changes are happening because there's no clear rule about what the team is and isn't authorized to absorb without renegotiating the timeline. That's a rules problem, not a process problem. And the reason there's no clear rule is probably that leadership hasn't made an explicit decision about what they're optimizing for: client satisfaction in the short term, or delivery reliability over time. That's not a rules problem.

That's a purpose problem, one layer further down.

So you have something that looks like an execution problem, being driven by a rules gap, that exists because a strategic tradeoff was never explicitly made. Fix the execution and it comes back. Fix the rules without addressing the purpose underneath them and the rules won't hold either, because the next time a client pushes, someone senior will override them in the name of the relationship. You have to go to the right level.

This is what makes organizational diagnosis hard. The place where the pain is visible and the place where the pain originates are almost never the same.

And the distance between them varies. Sometimes it's just one layer down: the process is broken and that's producing bad outputs. Fix the process and you're done. But more often, especially with problems that have been around a while and resisted previous fixes, the source is two or three layers below where the damage is showing. The real problem is that the organization doesn't have a shared understanding of what it's trying to achieve, or it's operating on information about the world that's out of date, or there's a rule that made sense three years ago and no longer reflects reality.

Load makes this harder to see, not easier. When the organization is under pressure, everything feels urgent, and urgency pushes attention toward the most visible problems. The deadline that's slipping, the customer who's escalating. These demand a response, and the response is almost always aimed at the level where the problem is visible. Which means that under high load, organizations are more likely to fix problems at the wrong level, precisely when getting the level right matters most.

When you're looking at a persistent problem, especially one where previous fixes haven't held, the need is to keep looking downward. Is the problem in how the work is being done, or in what the work is being done with? If the process and tools are sound, is the problem in what people are and aren't allowed to do? If the rules are clear and being followed, is the problem in what the organization is trying to achieve, or in how it's making tradeoffs? And if the purpose is clear, is the problem in what the organization actually understands about its situation?

Each of those questions points to a different layer. And the layer where the honest answer gets uncomfortable is probably the layer where the real work needs to happen.

The fix has to match the level. A process fix is fast and relatively cheap, but it won't hold if the problem is in the rules. A rules change is more disruptive but more durable, unless the problem is actually a purpose problem, in which case the rules will keep getting bent until the purpose gets clarified. You can spend a lot of time and money fixing things at the wrong layer and produce nothing lasting.

Ideally, however, you won’t. Because now you’ve got a way to start looking for the real problem. Next issue we'll talk about what it actually looks like to intervene at the right level.

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