I’ve had this conversation countless times—sometimes with a frustrated client, often with a colleague, and occasionally with my own reflection.

We hear familiar calls for help:
• “We need better communication.”
• “People need to collaborate more.”
• “We’ve lost our culture.”

These observations show up when an organization begins to struggle, and they are certainly valid concerns. Communication, collaboration, and culture are vital. However, after years of working inside and alongside complex organizations, I’ve come to believe they are rarely the fundamental issue.

Instead, what appears on the surface is a symptom pointing to something deeper, less visible, and far more challenging to name. What we call “organizational problems” are, in my view, systemic issues disguised as day-to-day frustrations.

The invisible operating code

The temptation is always to treat the symptom. It’s easier to mandate a new dashboard, launch a realignment, or schedule a team-building retreat. And truthfully, I’ve participated in these surface-level solutions myself—sometimes because it’s expected, and other times because it’s simply less demanding than addressing the systemic patterns.

But the real leverage is gained when we’re willing to look beneath the surface. The organization, like any complex system, is run by an invisible operating code made up of entrenched patterns and norms. When this code is faulty, the organizational challenges we see follow as a logical result.

The quiet system failures that erode performance and morale include:

The clarity gap: This manifests as a lack of clear, shared purpose and scattered, shifting priorities that pull teams in conflicting directions and contribute to unrealistic expectations.

Trust deficits: Low psychological safety and trust across teams lead to siloed thinking, turf protection, and bottlenecks in decision-making.

Process inconsistency: Ambiguous standards and bottlenecks in operations that force an overreliance on frantic firefighting instead of root-cause analysis and disciplined prevention.

Avoidance of truth: Fear of accountability that leads to avoiding difficult conversations and allowing core issues to compound silently.

Empowerment void: A systemic failure to develop leaders at all levels, coupled with a limited mandate for frontline teams to own and stop the line to fix defects at the source.

These aren’t moral flaws of the people; they’re the predictable outputs of the system they inhabit. We’ve learned to tune out this background noise, yet it determines how value is delivered, how decisions are made, and how people engage. (Interestingly, if we revisit The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox [North River Press, 2012], we can see the same underlying system issues.)

The organization as a mirror

If we accept this systemic view, we must also accept the “mirror effect.” Organizations faithfully reflect the clarity—or confusion—of the people who lead and shape them.

The organization reflects our values, our habits, our assumptions, and perhaps most painfully, our blind spots. This reflection isn’t always comfortable, but it’s precisely where the greatest opportunity for change resides.

The breakthrough comes when we make a conscious pivot in our approach. This isn’t just a process change; it’s a fundamental shift in mind-set.

Problem/pivot:
• Firefighting/disciplined continuous improvement
• Fear of accountability or blame/shared problem solving
• Silos/shared purpose and cross-functional alignment
• Confusion/clarity in roles, standards, and priorities

I’m not suggesting these systemic issues are easy to solve. But I believe that when we look deeper, we stop wasting energy trying to fix the mirror’s reflection. Instead, we gain the critical insight needed to address the source of the reflection.

So, maybe the highest-leverage question isn’t, “How do we fix this organizational problem?” Perhaps it’s, “What are the underlying systemic dynamics that are shaping what we see and frustrating our best efforts?”

When we’re willing to ask that question honestly, we can finally begin building systems that work for us instead of against us.