We’re totally lost, but we’re making great time.
Why hard-working organizations keep ending up in the wrong place.
I’ve sat in a lot of rooms full of busy, capable, genuinely hard-working people who are nonetheless completely lost. The calendar is packed. The status updates are green. The consultants are billing. And the thing that needed to get better six months ago has not gotten better.
This is not a story about laziness or incompetence (at least not solely). It’s a story about how organizations diagnose their own problems, and specifically, how they go wrong in ways that are so familiar they’ve become invisible.
After 20 years of working through organizational change with companies ranging from Fortune 500 giants to complex institutions, I’ve noticed four patterns that show up reliably when a transformation is burning energy without making progress. None of them are exotic. All of them are fixable. They’re also surprisingly hard to see, especially before they’ve pushed you significantly off course.
1. Find the true causes.
If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything. The same goes for a diagnosis.
Organizations are trained to think in straight lines: do X, get Y. Efficient. Also, very reliable at producing wrong diagnoses.
The real world is a web, not a chain. A team that keeps falling behind. A stakeholder group that stays chronically unhappy. Error resolution in a particular module that never improves. The temptation is to solve for what’s visible. But those are symptoms. The root causes are usually sitting one or two layers deeper, tangled up in incentive structures, change fatigue, unclear ownership, or a decision nobody revisited after it stopped working.
The organizations that get through this cleanly pause before converging. They map the system before they diagnose it. They ask what they’re assuming to be true that nobody has actually tested.
2. Use the right frame.
The most dangerous tool in the room is the one everyone forgot they were holding.
Every organization has inherited frameworks: the way a problem has always been categorized, the methodology the last consulting firm left behind, the mental model that made sense in a different era and stuck around. These aren’t bad tools. The trap is when they stop being tools and become walls.
This is one of the most expensive ways consulting engagements go wrong. A firm arrives with a proven methodology. Fits your problem to it. The methodology isn’t wrong exactly; it was just designed for a different class of problem. You get a rigorous, well-delivered solution to a problem you didn’t actually have. (Well, that’s time and money well spent.)
The fix: examine the frame before you look through it. Who defined the problem? What did they assume? What would change if you started over with a different definition?
3. Embrace discomfort.
Findings that offend no one and implicate nothing have probably not found the truth yet.
Organizations are socially complex, which means there is constant pressure toward comfortable conclusions. Findings get softened in the retelling. The analysis goes deep on the problems everyone already knew about and stops just short of the ones that would require real disruption.
Comfortable findings feel thorough. They produce manageable next steps. And they leave the actual problem intact. (Very tidy. Nothing changes, but in a structured, satisfying way.)
Discomfort in diagnostic work is a signal, not a stop sign. When the analysis starts pointing somewhere politically inconvenient, that’s usually a sign it’s getting close to something real. The goal isn’t to manufacture discomfort. It’s simply to not run from it.
4. Deal with problems.
Deferral dressed as prioritization is still deferral.
This one is almost too simple to say out loud, and it is extremely common. The underperforming leader who has been in place too long. The known flaw in the system that has already been budgeted. The initiative that lost momentum but hasn’t formally been stopped. Each deferral is individually defensible. Together, they accumulate into an organization working very hard to sidestep its own actual problems.
Sometimes deferral is genuinely strategic. Sequencing matters. The question worth asking is whether you’re making a deliberate choice or just postponing a hard conversation. They feel identical from the inside. The results are not.
None of these patterns require bad intentions. They require normal human beings operating inside normal organizational pressures. They’re recognizable once you know what to look for, and they’re all correctable.
By the time an initiative is visibly failing, most of the underlying decisions that caused the failure have already been normalized. Which is exactly why they’re so hard to see from the inside. And not coincidentally, why I do what I do.
Amy Kawabori
Founder, Kawabori Advisory | kawabori.com
