Almost Every Problem Is Fixable

Two months ago, my family and I bought a new car. Less than two months later, someone changed lanes on the highway and rammed right into it. Everyone was safe, thank God. But once that was established, I was furious—not because I was attached to the car so much but because of all the inconveniences I knew I was about to face. Phone calls with the insurer. The repair shop. The rental. All of it. The pebble in the shoe that soon becomes a boulder.

I opened our latest episode of the FROM THE CULTURE podcast with that story, mostly to vent, but Frances Frei and Anne Morriss turned it into a masterclass. Frei is a Harvard Business School professor of service management who served as Uber’s first head of leadership and strategy; Morriss is an entrepreneur and leadership coach. Together, they wrote Move Fast and Fix Things and host TED’s workplace podcast Fixable. Their body of work rests on the deceptively radical premise that almost any problem is fixable—not through sheer will but through design.

Based on the leadership adage, "organizations are perfectly designed for the results they get," Frei and Morriss argue that outcomes are the predictable, mathematical consequences of an organization’s operating system—dare I say, its culture. When a customer (or even an employee, i.e., the internal customer) experiences a point of friction, it’s not a coincidence. By their estimation, in most (if not all) cases, it’s a byproduct of the organization’s operating system, the conventions that undergird how people engage in collective work within the company. Therefore, "the fix" is rarely ever at the level of the one-off complaint or the individual who dropped the ball; instead, it’s at the system level. So, when Frei and Morriss say something is fixable, they’re talking about addressing the root cause of the situation, not the symptom. I mean, you treat the symptom and the problem returns next week. Redesign the system and healing beings.

When I say "redesign," I’m not talking about the veneer of the organization—the composition of the org chart or the aesthetics of the office, for that matter. No, I’m talking about the way the organization works, as Steve Jobs described product design in his famous 2003 New York Times Magazine interview. Design, through this lens, refers to how the different pieces of the organization (employees, technology, processes, etc.) fit together. Morriss illustrates this notion when she talks about slack: the flexibility in an organization's operations that enables it to absorb unexpected exogenous shocks, delays, or stresses without the entire system failing.

Frei builds on this idea of slack, explaining how most organizations optimize themselves to the moment, squeezing out every ounce of efficiency possible, assuming everything is going to go right. However, the instant something inevitably goes wrong (as it always does at some point), it becomes an inconvenience, a point of friction. The flight is late. The guest doesn’t like their room. The computers are down. It sucks for everybody. But when you build slack into the system—when you plan for variability because you know it’s coming—the same disruption stops being a crisis and becomes, in Frei’s words, context. What would have been an uncontrollable nightmare is now merely one permutation of many different circumstances that the organization designed for. It’s no longer a potential catastrophe; it’s just a Tuesday (albeit an eventful one).

Morriss continues this thought with a powerful punctuation: “If you are in the business of being of service to human beings, in any way or form, there is variability in the system.” Therefore, she stresses, “If you start from a design principle [that people are complex]…and that’s your jumping off point, then you can design an experience around that variability,” so that even when things do not go perfectly, it won’t present as inconvenient. That’s where slack enters the equation. Design the system with slack, and you’ll be prepared to relieve points of friction. That goes for customers and employees as well, because the system includes both the external and internal customer.

Frei and Morriss make the perfect duo for this kind of work. Frei started her career as an applied mathematician, studying operations (how manufacturing systems work), while Morriss spent her time studying people and the arts. Together, they explore how systems of people work, which really gets to the heart of our conversation with them, and the part where far too many organizations fumble. If you are relying on the heroic efforts of your best employees as the cure to your problems, you're fooling yourself, because heroics don't scale nor are they sustainable. Rather, the idea is to design a system that reliably produces excellence among your average employees—the majority of your workforce.

As Frei and Morriss assert, don’t design the job for the employee you wish you had, the mythical Superman you’re hoping will appear out of the heaps of resumes and endless LinkedIn profiles you’re sorting through; design for the employees you actually have. Build the system around the mere mortals you have in the midst, and if Superman shows up, great, but don’t bet on it. This is sage advice, if for no other reason than the fact that Superman, as Frei noted, is expensive and unlikely to stay anyway, so reliable excellence should be baked into the system, not a fantasy roster.

The system, as we underscored in our conversation, is how you get scale—and it is exactly what I spend my own work thinking about these days, except I call it soil. Cultural soil, to be specific. This is the system of meaning-making machinery that enables an organization to act coherently when the CEO isn’t in the room, or the founder can’t personally preach the gospel. And when issues arise that produce bad crops (inconveniences, points of friction, etc.), our first notion to fix the problem shouldn’t be to address the seeds, but first interrogate the soil—the system.

Check out our full conversation with Frances Frei and Anne Morriss on the latest episode of FROM THE CULTURE here.