Stokefire

If something keeps happening despite real effort to stop it, the system is producing it for a reason, and the fix-it-and-move-on approach isn't going to get there. But that raises an obvious next question: if the system keeps producing the same problem, what's it actually doing?

The answer, more often than leaders expect, is that it's protecting something.

That's a loaded way to put it, so let's get specific about what it means. Organizations aren't conscious, so they can’t make decisions to protect things. But they do develop patterns over time, and those patterns tend to persist, even when they're also causing visible harm. The repeating problem isn't just a malfunction. It's often a side effect of something the organization was doing on purpose, or at least something it has come to depend on, whether anyone planned it that way or not.

Here's a version of this that shows up constantly. A company has a senior leader, call him David, who's been there a long time. David knows everything. He knows the history, the clients, the exceptions, the reasons certain decisions got made the way they did. He's genuinely valuable. He's also a bottleneck. Decisions that should take a day take two weeks because they're waiting for David. Junior people have stopped trying to move things forward without him because it's faster to wait than to have him undo it later. Everyone knows this is a problem. David probably knows it too. But the problem keeps persisting because David's involvement is also doing something useful. It's providing quality control in a system where the written rules and processes aren't good enough to produce the right outcomes without him. Remove David from the loop and things might move faster, but they'd also go wrong in ways that are hard to predict. So the organization keeps waiting for David, even while complaining about it, because the alternative feels riskier than the delay.

Find out what happens to David in this week's episode of The Load. https://www.stokefire.com/post/what-is-the-system-protecting

Photo by Matthew Stephenson

It’s a meeting just about every leader is familiar with. The problem on the table isn't new. It might have been around for months, maybe longer. The people in the room are experienced, they care, and they understand that it’s important to fix the issue. But somewhere in the middle of the discussion, you can feel the conversation start to circle. Someone suggests a fix that was tried before. Someone else raises the same objection that was raised before.

The meeting ends with an action item or two, everyone leaves with good intentions, but a couple months later the problem is back.

The issue isn’t bad leadership. It happens in good organizations, with capable people and real urgency. **It's that the questions being answered in that room aren’t the questions that actually need answering.**

Most organizations are legit great at solving problems they can see. But if a problem keeps coming back, chances are good that something else is wrong.

Over the past couple decades of strategic work, we've seen that this ‘something else’ is almost always structural, specific, and traceable. The way the organization is built produces the problem, the same way a sloped floor will roll a ball to the same corner no matter how many times you pick it up and set it somewhere else. You can keep picking up the ball, or you can start looking at the floor more closely.

The hard part is that this is genuinely difficult to see from the inside. When you're in it - responsible for outcomes and managing real pressure - the visible problem is huge and unmissable. And responding directly feels right, because doing nothing means the problem will continue. It’s hard to stop before getting to work and ask whether you're solving the right problem in the first place.

Let’s game it out. A company is growing at a consistent pace. More customers, more products, more moving parts. The teams that built the place were small and fast. Decisions happened in hallways. Everyone knew what mattered and who to call. But as the organization got bigger, something started to slow down. Approvals that used to take a day now take two weeks. Simple projects require sign-off from four teams. Meetings multiply. People start talking about ‘red tape’, the term people use when the coordination overhead stops feeling worth it.
Leaders respond the way good leaders do. They cut meetings. They push decisions down. They streamline the approval process. Some of it helps. None of it for very long.

The question everyone's trying to answer in that situation is "how do we move faster?" That's reasonable. But it's aimed at the symptom. The question that leads somewhere useful is, "what is the organization actually doing when it slows down, and why is it doing that now when it didn't before?"

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This has been an excerpt of the latest from Tate Linden. Get his writings delivered to your inbox by signing up at https://stokefire.com/ -load-sign-up

Does your team *really* know how their organization performs under pressure? They know how it’s supposed to work and they know what the plan says. They know what good looks like when things are calm.

The Load is a newsletter about what actually happens when demand rises, decisions get compressed, and coordination starts to strain. It looks at the moments when things begin to slip and explains why, without defaulting to blaming people.

Because in most cases, the issue isn’t effort or alignment. It’s the structure people are operating inside.

Inside The Load, you’ll see how these patterns form, why they persist even when teams are capable, and how to spot the early signals before issues spread across the system. Everything is grounded in real operating conditions, not theory.
If you’ve ever felt like your team is working hard but still running into the same problems, this is built for you.

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Your culture responds to the inputs you feed it.

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Your take-away: how to keep your culture aligned with your mission so that your strategy and operations don't get snagged on hidden tripwires.

At Stokefire, we call this "embracing the wobble."

Read more about how you and your company's leaders can embrace the wobble for long-term mission effectiveness!

https://www.stokefire.com/post/embracing-stokefires-fifth-wobbling-value