Why Work Doesn't Work
And what you can do about it
Let me describe a normal Tuesday.
A company has a problem. Let’s say customers are complaining. Not a lot — enough. Enough that someone’s boss mentioned it in a meeting, which means someone’s boss’s boss might eventually hear about it, which means something must be done immediately, carefully, and in a way that makes it look like it was being done all along.
So they schedule a meeting.
Not to fix the problem. To discuss the scope of the problem. To align on whether it’s actually a problem. To make sure all stakeholders are at the table before any decisions get made, because the last time a decision got made without all stakeholders at the table, there was a whole other meeting about that.
The meeting produces a follow-up meeting.
The follow-up meeting produces a task force.
The task force produces a survey.
The survey produces a report.
The report produces a presentation.
The presentation produces a series of action items assigned to people who were not in the room when the action items were created, distributed via an email thread that has since been buried under forty-three other email threads, in an inbox belonging to a person who has been in back-to-back meetings since the presentation ended and has not seen the email, and will not see the email, and the problem — the original problem, the one the customer mentioned — is still happening.
This is not a failure. This is the system working.
I spent years as a criminal investigator before I became a performance consultant, and I’ll tell you the most useful thing that career taught me: when something goes wrong, the official explanation is almost never the real explanation. The official explanation exists to protect the system. The real explanation lives in the gap between how things are supposed to work and how they actually do.
That gap, in most organizations, is enormous.
I have watched companies spend more on announcing a transformation than on executing it. I have seen training programs designed to fix problems that weren’t training problems — they were authority problems, incentive problems, “we hired the wrong person for this job and now we’ve given them a direct report” problems — and watched those programs fail on schedule, to nobody’s surprise, followed by a debrief about what the training program could do differently next time.
I have sat in rooms where every single person knew exactly what was wrong and exactly what would fix it, and watched the meeting end without anyone saying either thing out loud, because the person with the authority to act wasn’t asking, and the people with the knowledge to fix it weren’t empowered to offer it, and the gap between those two things had been silently agreed upon by everyone present as the permanent weather of working in this place.
Here is the thing about broken systems that I keep having to explain and that nobody wants to hear:
They are not broken. They are working perfectly. Just not for you.
The dysfunction isn’t an accident. It’s not a sign that someone forgot to fix something. It’s the entirely predictable output of structures doing exactly what they were built to do. The meeting that produces another meeting was designed by people who are rewarded for the appearance of action rather than the results of it. The training program that changes nothing was purchased by someone who needed to demonstrate responsiveness rather than improvement. The process nobody follows was documented by someone who needed a process documented, not followed.
The system is producing exactly what it was designed to produce.
You just thought you were the customer. You’re not. You’re the input.
Nobody put a gun to anyone’s head and said: build something soul-crushing. It happened incrementally. One policy at a time. One approval layer at a time. One reorganization after another, each one solving the problem created by the last one, until the original purpose of the thing got so buried under the structure built to serve it that the two became indistinguishable, and then the structure won, and the purpose became a value printed on a wall in a font chosen by a committee.
Scale beat soul.
It always does. It did it to the local hardware store. It did it to the butcher and the baker and the craftsman down the street whose name you knew. And it did it to work — slowly, quietly, in ways that felt like progress right up until the moment you found yourself in the fourth meeting about a meeting and realized you couldn’t remember the last time you made something, sold something, or talked to a customer who actually needed what you were theoretically there to provide.
We got cheaper things and lonelier jobs. Nobody agreed to that trade. It just happened, one efficiency at a time, while everyone was in a meeting.
I’m not here to fix your organization (although I can help find a way to make it better).
Organizations this calcified don’t get fixed — they get outlasted. The people who actually improve things inside broken systems don’t wait for authority to flow downward. They investigate, they define, they document, they quietly solve for the lived version of the problem rather than the official one. Sometimes that works. Often it’s exhausting. Always it requires pretending the system is more rational than it is, for longer than any reasonable person should have to.
Some people are built for that. Some people are good at it, even.
But some people — a lot of people, I suspect, if they’re honest — look at the gap between what they thought work would be and what it actually is, and they want out.
Not out of ambition. Not out of laziness. Out of the completely reasonable conclusion that the game is rigged and the table is tilted and there might be a better use of their hands and their time and the thing they’re actually good at.
For those people, I have good news.
There’s another way. It’s older than the corporation, simpler than the org chart, and it has been running quietly and profitably every Saturday morning at a farmers market near you.