When the Person Is Not the Whole Problem

When something goes wrong, organisations often look first at the person closest to the problem.

Who made the mistake?

Who missed the target?

Who failed to follow the process?

Who made the wrong decision?

Sometimes, the answer matters.

People do make mistakes.

People make poor decisions.

People sometimes ignore expectations, avoid responsibility or behave in ways that are unacceptable.

Human System does not ask us to pretend otherwise.

But one of the easiest organisational mistakes is to explain a failure entirely through the behaviour of the person closest to it.

The person may be part of the problem.

They may even have made the immediate mistake.

But they may not be the whole problem.

What shaped the situation?

Suppose somebody makes a poor decision.

The obvious question is:

Why did they do that?

That is a reasonable question.

But it is rarely the only one worth asking.

Was the information they needed actually available?

Were expectations clear?

Was the workload realistic?

Did they have the knowledge, authority or resources needed to make a better decision?

Were they able to raise concerns?

Would anyone have listened if they had?

Were incentives pushing people towards a particular behaviour?

Did the process make the mistake more likely?

These questions do not remove the individual's responsibility.

They help us understand it accurately.

Human System asks us to consider both the person's actions and the conditions surrounding them. A decision may have been wrong, while the wider system may also have shaped the conditions in which that decision was made.

People do not act in a vacuum

Behaviour happens somewhere.

People work within conditions they did not necessarily create.

They inherit systems.

They follow processes.

They respond to targets.

They adapt to workloads.

They learn what is rewarded.

They notice what happens when somebody challenges a decision.

They see which rules are taken seriously and which ones are quietly ignored when the pressure is on.

Over time, these things shape behaviour.

That does not mean people are simply products of their environment with no agency or responsibility.

Of course they still make choices.

But those choices are made within a context.

And if we want to understand why something happened, the context matters.

A Human System approach therefore looks beyond individual intention and asks about the wider systems of behaviour that shape what becomes normal.

The easiest explanation can be the least useful

Blaming the person closest to the problem can be appealing because it gives us a simple explanation.

They made the mistake.

They were the problem.

Replace them, discipline them, retrain them or tell them to do better.

Sometimes individual action is absolutely necessary.

But if the same conditions remain, what happens when somebody else takes their place?

If the information is still unavailable.

If expectations remain unclear.

If workload is still unrealistic.

If people still cannot raise concerns.

If the incentives still reward the wrong behaviour.

Have we actually solved the problem?

Or have we simply changed the person who is exposed to it?

This is where the distinction from Post 4 becomes important.

The person closest to the visible failure may be part of the problem.

But they may also be the most visible symptom of something happening elsewhere in the system.

That does not make them a victim by default.

It means we should resist the temptation to stop thinking once we have found someone to blame.

Different problems require different responses

Not every failure is the same kind of failure.

Human System distinguishes between several possibilities.

A decision failure: the judgement itself was poor, given what was reasonably knowable at the time.

An implementation failure: the decision may have been reasonable, but it was not translated effectively into action.

A system failure: the surrounding conditions made the problem more likely or prevented people from responding appropriately.

A learning failure: the organisation experienced the problem but failed to change anything useful afterwards.

These can overlap.

A poor decision can happen within a poor system.

A reasonable decision can be implemented badly.

A problem can occur, be investigated thoroughly, and then happen again because nothing actually changes.

The point is not to create categories for the sake of it.

It is to avoid treating every problem as though it has the same explanation.

Because if we misunderstand the kind of problem we have, we are unlikely to choose the right response.

Context explains. It does not automatically excuse.

This is an important Human System safeguard.

Understanding context does not mean becoming endlessly accommodating.

You can understand why somebody did something and still conclude that it was unacceptable.

You can recognise pressure and still hold a boundary.

You can acknowledge that a system contributed to a failure while still expecting an individual to take responsibility for their part in it.

Context explains. It does not automatically excuse. 

That distinction matters because the opposite mistake is possible too.

We can become so focused on systems and context that individual responsibility disappears completely.

That is not Human System either.

If someone knowingly acts in a way that causes harm, understanding the circumstances does not mean there are no consequences.

If someone had the information, authority and opportunity to act differently, that matters.

If their judgement was unreasonable given what they knew, that matters too.

The aim is not to excuse.

It is to understand accurately enough to respond proportionately.

Before deciding who or what is to blame

Perhaps this is where organisations need to be more careful.

The question:

Who is responsible?

Can be important.

But asked too early, it can narrow our thinking before we understand what actually happened.

Perhaps we should first ask:

What happened?

What was the person responsible for?

What conditions shaped the situation?

What information and options were available?

What expectations were clear?

What else may have contributed?

What responsibility exists?

And then:

What needs to happen now?

Those questions do not make accountability weaker.

They make it more accurate.

Human System looks at the person and the system

For me, that is where this fits within Human System.

The framework is concerned with human judgement, but human beings do not operate independently from the systems around them.

People shape systems.

Systems shape behaviour.

Behaviour creates outcomes.

Outcomes give us information about what may need to change.

So when something goes wrong, Human System asks us not to choose automatically between:

The person is the problem.

Or:

The system is the problem.

Sometimes it will be one.

Often it will be both.

The important thing is to understand the relationship before deciding what happens next.

The person may have made the mistake. That does not mean the mistake began with them.

And equally:

The system may have contributed to the problem. That does not mean nobody is responsible.

When the person is not the whole problem, looking wider is not about finding excuses. It is about understanding enough to know where responsibility lies and what actually needs to change.