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.
What actually changes people’s performance
This is the part that sneaks up on new managers: pushing harder on individuals doesn’t fix system-level issues. It just makes people feel like they’re the problem, even when they’re responding exactly as the environment steers them.
But when the system gets clearer, people get clearer. The same team suddenly looks sharper, faster, and more confident. Not because anyone magically leveled up, but because the environment finally stopped working against them.
It’s the same thing you see when someone finally sticks to a new workout routine. They didn’t become a new person overnight — they changed the setup around them. A gym that’s five minutes away instead of thirty. Clothes laid out the night before instead of buried in a drawer at 5 AM. Fewer obstacles, less friction, easier follow-through.
The environment does half the work. People only look “more disciplined” because the system is no longer making everything harder than it needs to be.
You don’t need a huge overhaul to get there. Most of the impact comes from a few small, steady adjustments:
Make ownership explicit instead of implied.
Share the context you wish someone had shared with you.
Trace friction to its source instead of reacting to the surface-level moment.
Tighten the decision-making loop so ideas don’t float into the void.
Treat repeating patterns as architecture problems, not one-offs.
Ask the question at the top of your mind, even if it feels like a dumb question. It's probably not.
The system does the heavy lifting once it’s aligned. You just clear the path.
The moment everything clicks
What made systems theory stick for me wasn’t the academic version — it was watching it play out at work over and over again. Someone struggling wasn’t actually "struggling." They were guessing, or building in silence, or trying to work around a gap that nobody else could see. Once the environment shifted, the frustration disappeared.
The more you pay attention to the broader system, the more obvious these patterns become. You start noticing the upstream decisions behind downstream problems. You recognize the behaviors you used to interpret as performance issues for what they really are: responses to the structure around them. And you gain a whole new set of levers to make the team better that have nothing to do with pushing harder on individuals.
None of this is flashy. It’s not the kind of leadership work that gets quoted in company all-hands. But it’s the work that actually keeps teams stable, motivated, and able to execute without burning themselves out.
And honestly, it's way more fun than wrestling with the layout of my website.