I sat down this past weekend to write this week's Modern Leader post. Naturally, I ended up updating my website instead. One small tweak turned into reorganizing half the site, rewriting copy, and discovering that fixing one section somehow made three other things look wrong.
Annoying, yes. But also a good reminder of something I learned a long time ago, back in my therapy training days: nothing in a system exists on its own.
Touch one part, and something else shifts.
The myth of the isolated problem
Most issues that show up on teams look like standalone moments - a missed deadline, a frustrated engineer, a project that keeps slipping. It’s easy to zero in on the person closest to the problem. I used to do that constantly. But in practice, those moments are almost always symptoms of something happening underneath.
Shaky ownership.
Shifting priorities.
Invisible work.
Decision-making that depends too much on guesswork.
Expectations that everyone interpreted differently.
When something feels "off," it’s rarely about the individual. It’s about the structure wrapped around them.
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