Letting Things Break
When you think about how organizations function, it’s tempting to imagine them as machines, gears grinding, levers pulling, everything humming along in perfect sync. But anyone who’s spent time inside one knows the truth: they’re messy, human, and prone to breaking in ways that defy the neat diagrams in management books. The real question isn’t whether things will go wrong, they will, but how you deal with the inevitable cracks when they appear.
One approach is to rush in, patch things up, and keep the wheels turning. It’s the instinct most of us have: fix the problem, save the day, move on. There’s a certain satisfaction in that, a sense of control. But what if that instinct, noble as it feels, is sometimes the wrong move? What if the better way, at least in some cases, is to step back, let the mess unfold, and allow the organization to feel the weight of its own flaws?
Imagine a team buried in a process that’s quietly failing. Unclear goals or communication between departments is a tangle of dropped threads. The easy fix is to jump in, reassign tasks, send a stern email, maybe even stay late to clean it up yourself. But that’s a bandage, not a cure. The deeper issue, the one baked into the system, say, a lack of clear ownership or a tool that’s hopelessly outdated, stays hidden. You’ve solved the symptom, but the disease festers.
Now picture a different choice: you don’t intervene. The delays pile up, the confusion spreads, and soon enough, people start to notice. Complaints bubble up, meetings get called, and suddenly the problem isn’t just your problem, it’s everyone’s. The organization, sluggish as it can be, turns its attention to the snag. And because the failure is now loud and undeniable, it’s not enough to slap on a quick fix. The system itself has to shift, new tools get adopted, responsibilities get clarified, maybe even incentives get realigned. What started as a small breakdown becomes the lever that pries open a bigger, better change.
This isn’t about laziness or shirking responsibility. It’s about understanding where real progress comes from. Organizations are like living things, they adapt when they have to, not when you wish they would. If you’re always smoothing over the rough spots, you’re not just exhausting yourself; you’re robbing the system of the chance to learn. A little friction, a little pain, can be the signal that forces everyone to stop, look, and rethink.
Of course, this doesn’t work everywhere. If the house is on fire, you don’t sit back and wait for the architect to redesign the sprinkler system, you grab a hose. But not every problem is a fire. Think about it like a leaky pipe. You can keep mopping the floor every time it drips, and maybe that’s fine for a while. You stay dry, the problem’s contained, life goes on. But the pipe’s still leaking. The wood’s still rotting underneath. Sooner or later, you’re not just mopping, you’re replacing the floor. Now imagine you let the drip turn into a puddle, then a flood. It’s a mess, sure, but it’s a mess nobody can ignore. Suddenly, the landlord’s on the phone, the plumber’s at the door, and the pipe gets fixed. Not just patched, but replaced. The system adapts because it has to.
Think about the last time you saw a big company actually change. Not a superficial reorg or a splashy new mission statement, but a real shift in how it operates. Chances are, it didn’t come from a brilliant memo or a single hero riding in to save the day. It came from pressure, from something breaking badly enough that the old ways couldn’t hold. That’s not an accident. Systems don’t evolve when they’re comfortable, they evolve when they’re forced to.
The catch is, this approach demands trust. Trust that the people around you will eventually see what’s wrong, trust that the organization can handle a stumble without collapsing, trust that you won’t be blamed for letting the stumble happen. That’s hard. Blame is cheap, and it flows downhill fast. But if you can stomach the discomfort, you might find that the failures you don’t fix are the ones that matter most, not because they’re pleasant, but because they wake everyone up.
So next time you’re staring down a snag in the works, pause. Ask yourself: is this mine to solve, or is it the system’s? Sometimes the best thing you can do is nothing at all, not out of indifference, but out of faith that the bigger machine, clunky as it is, can figure itself out. When it does, it’ll be stronger for it. And you’ll have saved yourself a lot of pointless firefighting along the way.