Seeing the System

Here’s what changed when I stopped treating five problems as five problems

Ever feel like you’re fighting five separate problems at once — each urgent, each demanding action — yet nothing ever really gets fixed?

That’s often a sign the real challenge is the system around the work — the processes, decisions, roles, and workarounds that build up over time — not the individual issues. 

If you work in IT, this may sound familiar: a tweak here, a workaround there, a patch to bridge a gap. Each makes sense in isolation, each one solves a problem — for a while. But layered over months and years, it becomes harder to understand, harder to change, and harder to trust.

But the same pattern shows up far beyond technology. I’ve seen the same thing happen in resilience. For me, it really came to the fore when I was introducing a business continuity software tool and customising it to fit my organisation.

The out-of-the-box product was clean and simple — but as my team built it out, more requirements came in. Complexity crept up, often in the name of making it feel familiar or easier to use.

It forced me to zoom out and look not just at what people wanted to add, but why. What processes had been in place before? What friction were they routing around? How had it evolved to carry so much weight?
Stripped back, it became clear: under-resourcing, competing demands and unclear ownership had layered processes into the unchallenged “new normal”. And people were protective of it — these workflows had evolved for a reason.

We weren’t just configuring a tool. We were bending it to fit complexity that had become normal. 

Processes, dashboards, escalation routes, and reporting requirements — all added to solve a pain point — can subtly reshape where ownership sits, slow or dilute decision-making, and make the work feel heavier and more fragmented over time.

The real lightbulb moment happens when you stop, take a step back, and ask:

Red Flags 

Here are the red flags I started noticing: 

• Each new workaround delivers less benefit — and often more friction.

• Fixes start to compete with one another — improving one part while degrading another. 

• The cost of change starts to outweigh the value it brings.

• People stop trusting the process and start routing around it.

At some point, it becomes clear that adding another sticking plaster won’t help. That’s when it’s worth asking the deeper questions.

Here’s what changed for me

For a while, I treated each problem separately. Each felt urgent. Each seemed to demand action.

Then I stopped. I stepped back and started looking for root causes — asking why things were happening, and why they’d become normal. 

That shift didn’t give me instant answers but it gave me space:

• I wasn’t juggling five battles in my head.

• I realised this wasn’t about incompetence or resistance.

• I could pause and start asking better questions: Why does this process exist? Has the purpose changed? Is it still needed? Where should ownership really sit?

The system wasn’t failing, but it had become bloated, carrying more complexity than it was ever designed to. It was behaving in ways that made sense given how it had grown — but with its original purpose harder to see and harder to validate.

Patterns emerge

Once I started seeing it this way, other behaviours began to make sense too:

• What looks like resistance to change is often people protecting outcomes — spinning plates to keep things working inside a system that has grown unwieldy, complex, and confusing.

• Centralisation often emerges not by design, but by necessity — as work flows to the person or team best able to cope with the complexity, uncertainty and overload. Over time, progress can start to depend on the most willing individual rather than the right place in the system — and that’s when risk starts to concentrate. 

• Workarounds aren’t defiance. They’re the path of least resistance when the intended route no longer fits the reality of the work — a signal that things have become too complex, too slow, or misaligned with the outcomes people are trying to protect.

The most useful question isn’t “how can we add this requirement?”

It’s: what’s behind it — and what will it do to what we’ve already got in place?

That pause — that shift in perspective — is often the most powerful tool we have for breaking through inertia and stuck problems.

Because when you stop treating five problems as five problems, you don’t just find better answers — you stop running around in circles and start seeing the system that created them.