Your Organization Isn't Broken—Your Systems Are Just Designed for a World That No Longer Exists
I worked with a tech company last year that had a problem.
Senior engineers making $150K were spending hours filling out forms to get approval for a $600 software license. The approval required three signatures and took days to process.
The system worked perfectly. That was the problem.
When Good Systems Go Bad
The three-level approval made sense in 2008 when the company was a 50-person startup burning through venture capital. They needed tight financial controls to survive. Fifteen years later, they're a 600-person company with $200M in revenue, but that same approval process remained.
The original context was survival mode with limited runway. The new context was scale and speed-to-market. Nobody had stopped to ask whether the system still served them.
Meanwhile, their competitors moved at twice their speed.
The First Sign of System Failure
When I look at struggling organizations, the first sign that tells me it's a system problem rather than a people problem is simple: talented people consistently fail despite their best efforts.
When the same issues keep surfacing across different teams with different people, that's your red flag.
I look for patterns of friction. Decisions that take weeks when they should take days. Information that lives in silos. Approval processes designed for a different scale or risk profile.
The telltale moment is when someone says, "I know this doesn't make sense, but it's how we've always done it."
That phrase is diagnostic gold. It reveals a system operating on autopilot, divorced from current reality.
Why Smart Leaders Don’t See It
There's a phenomenon I call system blindness. These processes become part of the organizational wallpaper.
Leaders don't see them because they've been grandfathered into acceptance. If you've been approving those $500 requests for five years, you're not questioning the threshold anymore. You're just processing the queue.
There's also survivorship bias at play. The people who rose to leadership did so by mastering the existing system, so they have an unconscious investment in its validity. Questioning the system feels like questioning their own competence.
These systems rarely fail catastrophically. They just create chronic drag.
It's like gaining weight slowly. You don't notice the daily increment. You just wonder one day why you're exhausted climbing stairs.
The pain is distributed across hundreds of small moments rather than concentrated in one obvious crisis.
The Easy Way Out
When performance suffers, it's easier to blame execution or people than to examine the infrastructure.
Saying "our approval process is obsolete" requires admitting you've been operating suboptimally for years.
Saying "we need better execution" lets everyone off the hook.
What to Do About It
Start by looking for the friction points. Where do talented people consistently struggle? Where do decisions stall? Where does information get trapped?
Ask yourself: what context was this system designed for? Does that context still exist?
That's not a technology problem. That's a system relevance problem.
The good news is you don't need a complete organizational overhaul. You need targeted system redesign. Companies that address technical debt free up engineers to spend as much as 50% more time on value-generating work.
Your organization probably has the right people, the right mission, and the right purpose.
You just need systems that match the world you're actually operating in
