Why Your Team Keeps Having the Same Problems
The last time you moved, did you stop and think about all the junk you’ve been carrying from place to place?
Let’s just shoot is straight. Moving is not fun. It’s long, strenuous, sometimes painful, often emotionally loaded…
The Junk Drawer Effect
The junk drawer effect: when a business repeatedly adds new people, tools, or strategies on top of unresolved dysfunction and wonder why the same problem keeps coming back to them.
Picture this.
You’re packing up your home into boxes and bags, confirming the UHAUL pickup time, and keep underestimating how many boxes you need.
Since when did I accrue so much…junk? you think to yourself.
Maybe you just moved recently. Or maybe it’s been awhile. But moving never fails to shock all of us with just how much stuff we have. Even after we make treks to Goodwill and the dumpster.
And when we ask ourselves why we have all of this junk, we often to jump to:
“I’m so disorganized”
“My spouse needs to be more organized”
“I just don’t have time to take care of this stuff”
“This place has terrible storage, the new place will store it all so much better”
None of those explain how you continue to accumulate junk.
Why Your Team Keeps Having The Same Problem
Here’s the truth.
Each time you, you deal with the symptoms. You donate some of your old things and reorganize all the areas the junk lived…things feel purposeful. They appear purposeful. But since you didn’t change the system on how you store your things…one year later, the same areas just get full of more junk.
This is what we see everyday in the businesses we work with: junk. In the form of people, tools, and strategies. (which for the record, we don’t consider any individual to be “junk” but they might be in a junky position)
BY THE NUMBERS
According to research cited in the Harvard Business Review, 85% of executives believe their organizations are bad at diagnosing problems — and 87% say that flaw carries significant costs.
- (HBR, Root Cause Analysis in Organizational Leadership)
Here’s how this shows up in practice.
A team is struggling.
Struggling = missing their deadlines, awkward tense situations with other departments, results falling short.
Leadership makes changes. A reorg strategy, a staff reduction, a wave of new hires, a new project management tool, new department strategies, etc.
The honeymoon period begins and everyone feels hopeful. Things feel “back on track”.
Six months pass by, and all of the same problems are still there.
HOW?
Nobody stopped to address the root cause of the issues. They just packed people, tools, and strategies around the dysfunction. The junk drawer was completely unchanged.
Symptoms vs Root Causes: What’s The Difference?
Treating the symptom is typically tactical and action-based. It feels productive. This might be:
Hiring someone new
Implementing a new tool
Reorganizing the team
Treating the symptom is asking, “what happened?”
Addressing the root cause looks like:
PAUSING
Asking, “why does this keep happening?”
Root cause work is not a fan favorite because it isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t feel hyper productive the way shipping a new hire announcement does.
What does Root Cause work look like in practice?
Working on the root cause issue means ditching the Band-AID solution. It means sitting down with real people to have real conversations. It means approaching these conversations with objectivity and an open mind.
Asking:
Has this problem shown up before?
In what form?
How did we approach fixing it?
Why did the problem return?
Root cause work seldom lives with the people (although they’re involved), but rather with your systems.
99% of the “team” issues we see are not people problems. They’re system design issues. And about 80% of the time the reason those issues exist is because the business has become incredibly successful.
What’s In Your Junk Drawer?
If your team is running into wall after wall and the issues are starting to sound eerily similar, it’s probably worth asking: are we simply reorganizing around the problem, or are we actually solving it?
Not sure if your business is running on a Junk Drawer system?
FAQs
Why does my team keep having the same problems even after I make changes?
Most recurring team problems persist because leaders address the loudest issue in the room: a difficult employee, a missed deadline, a communication breakdown. They react quickly (because of how much they care about the business) and in that haste, don’t identify the underlying system that keeps producing those outcomes. New hires, tools, and strategies layered on top of unresolved dysfunction rarely stick. The fix requires diagnosing what’s actually broken at the system level before adding anything new.
What is root cause analysis in a business context?
Root Cause analysis (RCA) is the process of identifying why a problem keeps occurring, not just what happened. In a business context, it means asking: what in our systems, processes, or structures is creating this outcome repeatedly? Rather than replacing a person or adding a tool, RCA focuses on changing the underlying conditions that allow the problem to exist.
How do I know if I’m fixing symptoms or root causes in my business?
A quick signal: if you’ve “fixed” the same problem more than once, you’re likely treating symptoms. Or, if leadership believes the issue is solved and individual contributors do not, you’re likely treating symptoms.
Root cause work feels slower and less exciting than a new hire or a reorg — but it produces lasting change because it changes the system, not just the surface.
