The question every CEO eventually asks:
“I could have sworn we solved this problem a few months ago. Why are we dealing with it again?”
If you’ve been leading an organization for any length of time, you’ve almost certainly asked yourself that question.
A problem appears, your leadership team discusses it, decisions are made, responsibilities are assigned, and everyone leaves the meeting believing the matter has been resolved. For a while things improve. Then, a few months later, the same issue resurfaces. It may involve different people, it may show up in another part of the organization, and it may even look a little different, but somehow you know you’ve been here before.
It’s frustrating because everyone involved has been working hard. Nobody ignored the issue. Nobody deliberately failed to follow through. In fact, everyone genuinely believed they had fixed the problem.
Over the years, I’ve come to believe that recurring problems usually aren’t the result of poor effort. More often, they’re the result of solving the wrong problem. People naturally focus on the issue they can see, while the real cause often lies somewhere deeper in the way the organization is designed to operate.
That distinction is one of the most important shifts in thinking a CEO can make.
What We Experience Isn’t Always the Real Problem
One of the examples I use most often is communication because it comes up in almost every organization sooner or later.
Employee engagement surveys regularly tell us that communication needs improvement. People don’t feel informed. Departments seem disconnected. Information doesn’t flow as well as employees believe it should.
The response is almost always well intentioned. Management schedules more town hall meetings, launches another internal newsletter, encourages managers to communicate more frequently, or organizes team-building activities. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of those initiatives. In fact, they may improve communication for a period of time.
What I find interesting is that the same concern often appears in the next survey.
That should make us stop and think.
If communication was the problem, why didn’t solving it make the issue disappear? The answer, in my experience, is that communication is often the symptom rather than the cause.
Employees describe what they experience. They aren’t expected to diagnose organizational systems, nor should they. They experience the organization through the lens of their own role, their own responsibilities, and the interactions they have every day. If those interactions are frustrating, “communication” becomes the label they naturally apply.
The CEO has a different responsibility.
The CEO has to ask a more difficult question:
“What is it about the way we’ve organized ourselves that’s creating this experience?”
That question changes the conversation completely.
Looking Beneath the Surface
Let’s stay with the communication example for a moment.
Imagine two department heads who genuinely want to work well together. Both are experienced. Both are committed to the organization’s success. Yet every significant issue seems to require another meeting, another clarification, or another discussion before a decision can be made.
Eventually both conclude that communication between their departments isn’t very good.
Perhaps they’re right. Or perhaps they’re describing the symptom rather than the cause.
What if neither department has a clear understanding of where one person’s accountability ends and another person’s begins? What if each believes the other owns a particular decision? What if the authority to make that decision has never really been clarified?
Suddenly the repeated conversations make perfect sense. People aren’t struggling because they can’t communicate. They’re struggling because the structure hasn’t made it clear how they should work together.
That’s a very different problem, and it requires a very different solution.
The Rules of the Road
I’ve often compared accountability and authority to the rules of the road because I think it’s an analogy everyone immediately understands.
When we approach an intersection, we don’t stop to negotiate who should go first. We don’t rely on waving people through or trying to guess what the other driver intends to do. Traffic flows because everyone understands the rules before they reach the intersection.
Now imagine removing those rules.
People would still communicate. They’d wave, point, smile, and flash their headlights. Eventually most drivers would make it through the intersection, but the process would be slower, more frustrating, and considerably less predictable.
The problem wouldn’t be communication.
The problem would be that the rules governing movement were unclear.
Organizations work in exactly the same way.
When accountability and authority are clearly defined, people spend much less time negotiating responsibilities because they already understand how work is intended to move through the organization. Decisions happen at the appropriate level, handoffs become smoother, and communication improves almost as a by-product of having a better-designed system.
Asking Better Questions
One of the things I’ve noticed over the years is that as CEOs grow in their role, the questions they ask begin to change.
Early on, it’s natural to focus on solving today’s issue because today’s issue is what demands attention. The pressure is immediate, and the expectation is that the CEO will make it go away.
Over time, however, the conversation becomes more interesting.
Instead of asking, “How do we solve this problem?” experienced leaders begin asking, “Why did our organization produce this problem in the first place?”
That’s a much more difficult question to answer. It also happens to be the question that leads to lasting improvement.
As the head of the organization, your responsibility isn’t simply to solve today’s operational issues. It’s to build an organization that consistently produces better outcomes tomorrow. That means paying attention not only to the visible symptoms but also to the systems that create them.
Organization design, accountability, authority, managerial leadership, and talent management aren’t abstract management concepts. They’re the mechanisms that determine how work flows, how decisions are made, and whether recurring problems quietly disappear or continue to return in different forms.
Changing the Conversation
One of the things I enjoy most about working with CEOs is watching this shift in thinking take place.
We usually begin by discussing a specific issue. Perhaps it’s slow decision-making. Perhaps departments aren’t collaborating well. Perhaps there’s concern about communication or frustration with recurring operational problems.
By the end of the discussion, however, we’re rarely talking about the original issue.
We’re talking about the system that produced it.
That’s the conversation I find most rewarding because systems can be redesigned.
When the system improves, many of the recurring problems simply stop appearing. Not because people are working harder, but because the organization has made it easier for people to succeed.
The next time someone says, “This keeps happening,” resist the temptation to jump immediately to another solution.
Instead, pause for a moment and ask a different question.
“What is it about our organization that’s allowing this problem to keep coming back?”
You may discover that the recurring problem isn’t your biggest frustration.
It may be your organization’s most valuable source of insight.
People report symptoms. Leaders solve systems.
Seeing Beyond Your Own Perspective
Here’s one final thought that’s worth considering.
As the head of the organization, you’re immersed in the business every day. You know the people, the history, the personalities, and the pressures better than anyone else. That knowledge is invaluable, but it can also make it difficult to distinguish between a symptom and its underlying cause.
I’ve found that one of the greatest benefits of working with a confidential peer group is that it brings fresh eyes to familiar problems.
When a CEO presents an issue to ten or twelve experienced leaders, something interesting happens. The discussion rarely stays focused on the immediate problem for very long. Before long, someone asks a question that changes the direction of the conversation.
“Have you considered whether the issue is actually…?”
Very often, another member has lived through something remarkably similar. They aren’t emotionally attached to the situation, they have nothing to gain from the outcome, and they’re not influenced by the history or politics inside the organization. They simply bring another perspective and another set of experiences to the discussion.
I’ve watched this happen countless times over the years. A CEO arrives convinced they’re dealing with one issue and leaves realizing the real challenge lies somewhere much deeper in the organization.
That’s one of the reasons I believe confidential peer groups are so valuable. They don’t simply help leaders solve problems.
They help them ask better questions.
And as we’ve discussed throughout this article, better questions are often what lead us to better solutions.
Learn More
One of the greatest benefits of a confidential peer advisory group is that it helps you distinguish between the symptoms you’re experiencing and the underlying issues that deserve your attention.
If you’d like to learn how TEC Canada brings together experienced CEOs, presidents, owners, and executives to challenge one another’s thinking and solve the issues that matter most, I’d be pleased to introduce you to one of our groups.
Learn more about TEC Canada/Vistage International here:
