When something isn’t working in an organisation, our instinct is often to look at the people.
Do they need more training? Better leadership skills? More accountability? Greater confidence? A different mindset?
But what if the people aren’t always the problem?
In my recent Future Fit Leadership conversation with engineer, entrepreneur and author Felicity Furey, we explored a different way of looking at organisational performance: examine the system before trying to fix the individual.
It is an idea that comes naturally to an engineer.
Engineers understand that systems influence outcomes. Change part of the system and you can change the behaviour it produces.
Felicity shared a fascinating example from research into performance ratings in male-dominated industries.
Men were more likely to receive a rating of 10 out of 10, while women were more likely to receive 8 out of 10. Importantly, Felicity explained that the bias was not simply men rating women differently. Women were also rating women in the same way.
The researchers changed one thing.
Instead of rating people out of 10, they changed the scale to six.
The bias disappeared.
Felicity’s explanation was that an unfamiliar scale interrupted the mental shortcut. Instead of automatically reaching for a familiar score, people had to stop and think about their assessment.
No additional unconscious bias training. No attempt to make women more confident. No instruction telling people to think differently.
They changed the system.
The systems we rarely question
That example raises an important question for leaders.
How many outcomes inside our organisations are influenced by systems we have stopped noticing?
Performance reviews. Promotion criteria. Meeting structures. Recruitment processes. Communication rhythms. Reporting lines. Targets. Incentives. Even who needs to approve a relatively simple decision.
Felicity spoke about working on a small desktop review for a mine that needed approval from an American headquarters. She recalled spending more time trying to get the project approved than actually delivering the work.
The system made sense at an organisational level. But at an individual level, it created unnecessary friction.
This is where leadership needs to become more curious.
When someone is struggling to perform, we can ask what they need to do differently.
But we should also ask:
What is it about the environment we have created that may be making it harder for this person to succeed?
Culture lives in the small things
We also tend to talk about culture as though it is something abstract.
Felicity takes a much more practical view.
When she looks at an organisation, she looks at its rhythms. Do teams meet regularly? Are one-on-ones actually happening? Do people check in with each other? Can a leader take a holiday and trust their team to continue delivering?
She also pays particular attention to middle managers.
They are often caught between delivering the work and leading the people, while senior leaders may be focused on strategy and more junior employees remain enthusiastic about what the organisation is trying to achieve.
And ultimately, she looks at actions.
An organisation can have excellent policies, values and awards, but the everyday behaviour of its people tells you far more about the culture they are actually experiencing.
That is an important distinction.
Culture isn't what we say we value.
It is what our systems repeatedly encourage, reward, tolerate and make possible.
Belonging needs to be designed
Felicity’s own leadership journey makes this particularly relevant.
She went to an all-girls school where the message was that girls could do anything. Then she arrived at university expecting women to represent perhaps 40 per cent of her engineering course.
Instead, it was closer to 10 per cent.
Suddenly she was often the only woman in the class or the room.
She became reluctant to put forward ideas or put her hand up because standing out already felt risky. If she offered a bad idea, she worried she would be pushed further to the outside.
Eventually, she did put her hand up.
That decision led to an event encouraging girls to consider engineering. It sold out within days, a second event was added, and 57 per cent of participating girls changed their response from never having considered engineering to saying they would.
That initiative eventually became a charity that has reached more than 15,000 students.
There is a leadership lesson in that story beyond diversity.
People can have capability that remains invisible because the environment has not made it safe for them to use it.
Felicity described her charity as a “sandpit” where she could experiment without feeling that a boss was looking over her shoulder or that failure would cost her a job.
It gave her permission to discover a different version of herself as a leader.
It makes me wonder how much capability sits unused inside our organisations because people are waiting for the conditions to feel safe enough to try.
Have we designed work around extraction?
Our conversation then moved to something I think leadership needs to grapple with much more seriously.
Most businesses are designed to extract something from people.
We need performance, productivity, growth and profitability. Those things matter. Without them, we don't have sustainable businesses or jobs.
But perhaps there is another side to the equation.
If we are asking people to contribute their time, energy, ideas and capability to our organisations, what are we putting back into them?
Felicity spoke about the difficulty of measuring this because so much of what matters is intangible.
Earlier in her career, her contribution could be measured through drawings produced, reports completed, project profitability and the P&L.
But one of her strengths was building relationships.
That contribution was much harder to put into a spreadsheet.
We have become very good at measuring output.
We are much less sophisticated at measuring the human conditions that make sustainable output possible.
AI makes the human question more important
This becomes even more relevant as AI changes work.
Felicity is not anti-AI. She uses it and sees it as another tool, much like the modelling programs engineers have used for years.
But she has also deliberately stepped back from using it for some of her thinking and writing.
Why?
Because she doesn't want to outsource imagination, curiosity, creativity or judgement.
She also worries about what younger people may miss when technology and flexible work remove some of the informal learning that used to happen simply by being around experienced colleagues.
A graduate might once have overheard a senior person arguing through why one option was better than another. They weren't simply learning the answer. They were learning how someone arrived at it.
That development of judgement is much harder to replicate through an AI-generated response.
As technology becomes better at providing answers, perhaps one of the responsibilities of leadership will be ensuring our people don't lose the ability to think.
From productivity to impact
At the end of our conversation, I asked Felicity to imagine historians looking back at our generation 50 years from now.
What did she hope they would be grateful we had the courage to change?
Her answer was provocative:
“Thank God they stopped worrying about productivity.”
Not because productivity has no value.
Her argument is that our definition of success needs to expand.
She suggested shifting our attention towards impact.
I think there is something powerful in that distinction.
Productivity asks: How much did we produce?
Impact asks: What difference did it make?
What was the impact on the business?
What was the impact on the people who chose to work there?
What was the impact on the customer?
What was the impact on the community?
And what did we leave behind?
That connects directly with Felicity's work around legacy.
She argues that legacy shouldn't suddenly become relevant when a leader reaches the final years of their career. It can be built throughout a career through mentoring, developing others, sharing knowledge and consciously thinking about what we leave for the next generation.
Perhaps that is also where the systems conversation ultimately leads.
Leadership isn't simply about getting better performance from the people we have today.
It is about designing organisations in which people can contribute, grow, belong and do meaningful work, while still delivering the commercial outcomes a business needs.
And sometimes achieving that doesn't require another leadership program, another wellbeing initiative or another attempt to change people's behaviour.
Sometimes we need to look at what we have designed around them.
Because if the same problem keeps appearing across different people, perhaps it is time to stop asking what is wrong with the people.
And start looking at the system.