This month’s been a busy one with potential new clients getting in touch with me. It must be the “back to school” feeling with founders wanting to address those longstanding problems that have been holding them back.

I finally had a bit of time last night to reflect on the initial calls I’ve done so far. I noticed a bit of a theme across three of them.

They were three different founders in three very different sectors – but broadly all three started telling me their story the same way:

“Our roles aren’t clear.” “We need a proper operating rhythm.” “The structure isn’t working.”

This is all classic system design language and is the kind of thing I’ve built a whole business around fixing (excuse the cheeky extra Mallard plug).

So on paper that’s exactly the kind of work we do: workflow first design, organisational rhythms that actually work etc. I could have taken any of those three briefs from founders at face value and got straight to the “doing” work.

But something in each discovery call piqued my spidey-sense a bit. It felt like the founders were using the need for a better operating system as a proxy for engaging in the harder work they actually needed to do.

I will always advocate for the minimum viable operating system that’s right for a particular founder’s business at that particular stage of growth. It’s a vital scaffolding to enable the growing business to function effectively.

Here comes the “but”…

That operating system is never a substitute for doing the hard “people work” that you need to do to get everything working better.

In each of those founder calls I sensed an avoidance of engaging with one or two hard issues. The founders had fallen into a trap by not recognising their own avoidant patterns and seeing system design as a panacea for the people work.

It’s far easier for a founder or integrator to open a Miro board and map an operating model than it is to rehearse what they’re actually going to say to someone when they need to have a difficult conversation.

System work feels productive. It’s visible, it’s structured and nobody in the room has to be particularly uncomfortable.

But avoiding the individual conversation by doing more system design is still avoidance.

Let’s be clear on this: I don’t think this means system design is a con. Clear roles and a rhythm that doesn’t depend on who shouts loudest matter a lot – and a lot of founders I end up working with are genuinely held back by the absence of them.

But there’s a point past which the system has done its job. The team knows what’s expected. The resources are there. The scaffolding holds everything up. And the thing that’s still not working isn’t a process gap or something that needs more systemising.

It’s often a person. It’s often a conversation. It’s often the need to recognise that someone can’t do what you need them to do.

And most importantly the founder knows it but hasn’t felt able to address it yet.

No amount of operating system work fixes that for you.

So thanks to my reflections last night, here are a few things I’ve added to my list of things to listen for on discovery calls. Hopefully they might be useful to you too, whether you’re building a system or asking someone else (like me!) to fix it:

• Ask what the system is standing in for. If you hear “we need clearer roles” ask what happens if roles were already clear tomorrow. If the answer is “someone would still need to change how they work,” do a sense check/repeat back to see if that is the underlying issue.
• Notice the person/role that gets mentioned once. In discovery calls a name/role that comes up briefly and then doesn’t come up again, use this as a sign to probe further. Don’t ignore this signal.
• Build the minimum viable system then stop building. Check there’s enough structure that people know what’s expected of them and have what they need to do it. Beyond that challenge whether more scaffolding is representing avoidance of longstanding people issues.
• Say the uncomfortable thing earlier than feels natural. Recognise there’s often not a “good” time or the “right” time to engage in the difficult people stuff. There’s always a valid reason you can justify putting it off. Ask the founder if they recognise this.

None of this is a criticism of the founders on those calls. Looking back I recognise that I’ve built the scaffolding to avoid the harder stuff myself on more than one occasion. It’s just a genuinely comfortable place to hide because the work looks so much like real work and does make a real difference – it’s just not the whole picture and never will be.

So a question to leave you with…what hard conversations do you already know you need to have that you’re putting off this week?

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