Insights

There is a pattern that keeps coming back in almost every organization: when something goes wrong, the first instinct is to look for the person responsible. Someone entered the wrong data. Someone forgot a step in the process. Someone made a mistake. And while that may be true on the surface, it rarely tells the full story.

In many cases, the real culprit is not the person. It is the system they were working in.

Take a simple example. A colleague enters a date in the wrong format in a CRM system. Instead of 15/03/2026, they write 15 Mar ’26. A manager notices, gets frustrated, and sends a company-wide reminder: please use the correct format. Everyone nods, agrees, and two days later it happens again. Different person, same mistake.

What the reminder did not fix is the reason the mistake keeps occurring in the first place: the system accepts any input. It is an open text field. Had it been a date picker, a small calendar would appear, the employee clicks a date, and the system automatically formats it correctly. No reminders needed. No frustration. The problem simply stops existing.

This is what I mean by blaming the system instead of the person.

And it goes further than just IT systems. Think about the colleague who keeps missing deadlines, not because they are lazy, but because responsibilities in the team are unclear and priorities shift daily without any structure. Or the new hire who keeps making errors in a financial report, not because they are careless, but because the Excel file they inherited has hidden formulas, inconsistent logic, and zero documentation. In both cases, a conversation about performance misses the point entirely. The system is the problem.

A tool that helps cut through these situations quickly is the five times why. Instead of stopping at the first answer, you keep asking until you reach the actual root cause.

Why did the employee enter the date incorrectly? Because they put it in the wrong format.

Why did they put it in the wrong format? Because the system allowed any format to be entered.

Why did the system allow that? Because there were no restrictions or guidelines in place.

Why were there no restrictions? Because it was built as an open text field.

Why was it built that way? Because no one questioned it during implementation.

Five questions. And suddenly the action points are obvious: it is not about reminding employees, it is about improving the field type in the system. The employee was never really the problem.

What makes this pattern so persistent is that blaming a person feels faster. You have a name, you send a message, the conversation is over. Improving a system takes time, requires ownership, and means acknowledging that the design was flawed to begin with. That is uncomfortable, which is exactly why it so rarely happens.

My message is the same one I keep returning to in my work: take a moment to look at the systems behind the behaviour. Not just the visible ones like software and IT infrastructure, but also the less obvious ones: how tasks are divided, how information flows, how processes are documented, and how new people are onboarded. These are all systems, and they all shape how people perform.

The next time something keeps going wrong, pause before pointing at a person. Ask a few why’s. The answer might surprise you.

Need help mapping or improving the systems in your organisation? We are here to help. Email us at info@SBNS-Solutions.com or schedule a meeting to work through your challenge together.