Fixing the System That Can’t Fix Anything

This article was born not from theory, but from real-life observations. Repeated attempts to report or resolve simple matters, like requesting a repair from a service provider, have become a multi-week ordeal. What ought to take hours often stretches into weeks. A chain of emails, forms, disclaimers, and faceless handovers. Just as you think you’re making progress, the chain breaks: someone has left, the case is reassigned, and the process begins anew. And the problem? Still unresolved.

We are living in an age where we are so consumed by how things are done that we’ve forgotten why they’re done at all. Process has overtaken purpose. Compliance has overridden common sense. It’s a world where ticking boxes is rewarded more than solving problems and this, I believe, is making us collectively inefficient, disillusioned, and dangerously complacent.

I’ve watched this evolution unfold across industries: in property management, customer service, technology, healthcare and other. We’re building systems that are exquisitely documented, heavily regulated, yet tragically ineffective. It’s not that people don’t want to help, it’s that they can’t. They’ve been trained to follow procedure, not to think. They’re instructed to escalate, not to resolve.

We are becoming a society ruled by process not outcome.

The modern workplace is now defined by its rituals: endless meetings, Slack messages, dashboards, workflows, regulations, procedures, compliance trackers, and email chains. Communication has become the work itself. Success is no longer about impact or resolution, but about visibility, being seen to be working, not necessarily achieving anything.

We’ve become transactional, not task-oriented. Structured, yet stagnant. Everyone has partial knowledge, but no one owns the problem.

In this environment, those with actual authority to fix things have become rare. Often, they’re buried beneath layers of bureaucracy or have been outsourced to distant third parties. Decision-making is fragmented, dispersed and deferred.

What’s even more troubling is that this isn’t just frustrating it’s demoralising. It disempowers our most capable people. It conditions our young talent to become process administrators rather than problem-solvers. It drains initiative, rewards delay, and punishes independent thinking.

Some may say this is the cost of scale or the price of compliance. Others may argue that technology and regulation protect us from error or abuse. And while those aims are important, the pendulum has swung too far. We are no longer building systems that serve people we are building systems that serve systems.

And when something goes wrong, there’s no human at the other end of the line. No one with judgement, accountability, or discretion. Just a system that loops you back to the start or worse, to nowhere.

Where Do We Go From Here?

When it comes to providing a service, we must start by redefining what success looks like. Reward outcomes, not optics. Celebrate the people who solve problems not just those who report them. Flatten the structure. Eliminate layers that add friction without adding value. Empower those on the front line. Digitise with wisdom. Technology should simplify not entangle. Automation should enhance human judgement not eliminate it. Restore human discretion. Train your teams to think. To act. To own. Give them the tools and the trust to do so. Reintroduce purpose. Remind ourselves why the system exists in the first place not to enforce a process, but to deliver a result.

There is something profoundly human about problem-solving, about making things work, about helping someone swiftly and decisively. We need to bring that spirit back into the heart of our service organisations. This is not a nostalgic call for the past, nor a rejection of structure or technology. It is a plea for balance. For re-centring our systems around the people they are meant to serve. For valuing competence over compliance.