The Leadership Friction  |  Edition No. 24  |  August 11, 2026

The Systems No One Agreed To Build

Every leader in this organization solved their own problem, and each fix was reasonable. Together, they built a company running on rules nobody agreed to and no one could see.

A CEO asked me something last month that I hear more often than people realize.

“We have systems everywhere. Why does it still feel like chaos?”

It’s one of the most common questions I get, and it usually comes from a leader who has already tried the obvious fixes. New software. A new org chart. Another retreat. None of it holds for long.

Here’s what I’ve noticed. The chaos almost never comes from a lack of systems. It comes from too many systems, built by too many people, none of them talking to each other.

The Question

What the Question Is Really Asking

This is the third piece in a series I’ve been working through this year on the three lenses of the Next to Nunn Diagnostic Method™. The first was People. The second was Communication. Systems is where those two either take root or fall apart.

Here’s where leaders get stuck. They assume a systems problem means something is missing. A process that was never written down. A tool no one bought. So they go looking for the gap.

Sometimes that’s right. More often, the problem isn’t absence. It’s collision.

The Case

What I Found When I Looked Closer

A service firm came to me at 150 employees, a size where the cracks usually start to show. Turnover was high. The brand had started to drift, different departments were representing the company in different ways depending on who you asked. Clients were leaving, and no one could point to a single reason why.

On paper, it looked like a people problem. Maybe a culture problem. It was none of those things, at least not at the root.

What had actually happened was this. As the company grew, every leader and every team quietly built their own way of getting things done. A workaround here. A shortcut there. Each one made sense on its own. Sales built its own way of handing off new clients. Operations built its own way of tracking priorities. A department head built a reporting rhythm that worked for their team and nobody else’s. No one was wrong. No one was lazy. Everyone was solving the problem directly in front of them.

The organization wasn’t short on structure. It had too much of it, all disconnected, quietly working against itself.

People spent their days putting out fires instead of collaborating, because there was no shared system to collaborate inside of. That’s where the confusion came from. That’s where the frustration came from. And eventually, that’s where the client experience started to slip.

The Pattern

Why “Everyone Doing Their Best” Isn’t the Same as a Healthy Organization

I want to sit with that for a second, because I think it’s the part most leaders miss.

Every one of those workarounds was a reasonable response to a real problem. That’s what makes this pattern so hard to spot. It doesn’t look like dysfunction from the inside. It looks like initiative. It looks like people stepping up. It’s only when you zoom out that you see thirty small, well-intentioned solutions pulling the organization in different directions at once.

Communication problems are often ownership problems. Culture problems are often leadership consistency problems. And what looked like a people problem here was, underneath it, a systems problem the whole time. The people weren’t the friction. The absence of one shared system was.

The Work

The Work

We ran a full organizational diagnostic, then rebuilt the operating structure the company actually needed at its current size, not the one it had outgrown five years earlier. Alongside that, I worked directly with the CEO through executive coaching. Not just on the fix. On how to see the organization.

That second part mattered more than I expected going in.

Fixing the systems resolved a surprising amount downstream. Turnover eased. Collaboration came back. The brand started acting like one company again instead of five. But the change that actually stuck, the one the CEO still brings up, wasn’t a number.

It was learning to diagnose instead of react. Once a leader can see a challenge as a pattern with a root cause, instead of a string of unrelated fires, every future problem becomes something to work through on purpose, not something to survive.

Where in your organization is everyone doing their best, and the business is still absorbing the cost of it?