No more false solutions!
My book, False Solutions, came out this month! It’s a parable about a fictional company called Relay, run by a leadership team of capable people who fall into a cycle of well-intentioned fixes that don’t work. I based the characters on leaders I’ve worked alongside and scenarios I’ve seen over the past 20 years.
This month to celebrate the book launch, I wanted to share with you a scene.
Where we are in the story: Relay is an online marketplace whose growth has stalled at 2 to 4 percent after years of rapid expansion. Swati, the COO, has led one fix after another but none of them have moved the business. Over the weekend, she watched her daughter and two friends try to climb up a playground slide while whoever stood at the top shouted that the ground below was lava. On Monday morning, she pulls two colleagues, Carlos and Susan, into a meeting.
“Then it just hit me. We invested in one solution after another.” She started counting with her fingers and said emphatically, “A new function—the I&I team—not the answer. New technology, not the answer. A huge internal marketing campaign, not the answer. Best-in-class training is not the answer. Each one of them was a false solution. They weren’t wrong or not worth doing. Each one is actually worthwhile, but they are incomplete answers for what we are truly trying to do.”
“The system is making it difficult for them to do that ‘right’ thing.” Swati continued passionately, “We’ve been pushing people to innovate, act like intrapreneurs, but everything—or almost everything—about the system they’re in has been making it difficult to do it. We asked them to climb up a slide that was designed for sliding down.”
After a pause, Carlos said, “To be fair, some of them do make it up the slide.”
“But,” Swati held up a finger as if in warning, “they are doing it in spite of the system. The top performers get creative, like that kid with the sticky hands and flexible ankles. But eventually they get tired or frustrated, and they stop being able to climb.”
She leaned forward, teetering at the edge of her seat and added heatedly, “Our best performers can temporarily outsmart or outwork the system. That’s when we start to see some change. But eventually, the system simply outlasts and outweighs them.”
“I’m starting to catch your drift, Swati,” Carlos said, leaning back in his chair, crossing his arms. “When the system wears them down, those people exit or conform, and we keep getting what we’ve optimized for.”
“Yesssss,” Swati replied, pointing at him energetically. “The system is huge and self-reinforcing. It won’t tire the way people do, so it will always win. It didn’t matter how loudly or repeatedly we told them. The issue wasn’t the message, nor was it their effort or capability. Susan, Carlos, it wasn’t a people problem—it was a systems problem.”
Susan let out a heavy sigh. “I hate to say this because I want Relay to succeed, but is this too big to change? Swati, this is a multi-year transformation we’re talking about.”
“I know,” Swati replied. “But do we avoid changing only because it is hard?”
She knew their answer and continued. “We designed this slide as leaders. It’s our responsibility to make sure it’s the right design.”
The three leaders looked at each other, the gravity of their shared realization sinking in. Carlos voiced the question they were all thinking. “So, what now?”
What Swati sees on the playground is the idea at the center of the book, and of our work: most “people problems” are actually design problems. Relay’s leaders asked for innovation while nearly everything around their people, from how work was bundled to what got measured and rewarded, pointed somewhere else. The few who climbed anyway did it in spite of the system, until the system wore them down.
The rest of the book follows what Relay’s leaders do next, starting with learning to see the system they built.
Here’s a question for you to consider: what are you asking your people to climb right now, and what about the way their work is designed keeps sending them back down?
