The helter-skelter that never ends

I was wandering the streets of Sheffield at 6am. No, I wasn't returning from a night out. In fact, I wasn't even living in my birth city at the time. We were visiting from Winchester to see family and were holed up in the rather unremarkable Novotel – the kind of hotel that makes you realise 90% of the positive experience of a hotel is in the service. There wasn't much of it.

My dad had told me Sheffield had changed since I left. Not because of me, although maybe I did have more influence on the city than I realised. He said it was dangerous, debauched and rife with crime, in the way that people who watch the news 24/7 experience the real world. Well, here I was at 6am, Ricoh camera in hand, wandering the streets of my youth without a single encounter of the violent kind, nor seeing much in the way of debauchery either. Instead, I spotted this helter-skelter, which deserved a cheeky snap on the camera.

As I sat in the cold, with a hot coffee for company, it reminded me of work. Only imagine a helter-skelter that never ends. You start at the top, you get to the bottom, and you're magically back at the top again. And down and around and up and around you go, like a scene from Enid Blyton's Faraway Tree. That's what I was thinking about – and how many problems at work have that same feeling. The sensation of being stuck on the ride: going round and round, solving the same issues, hiring new people, changing roles, and yet arriving back at exactly the same place. Different faces. Familiar results. All along for the ride. Yes, my mind works in funny ways.

I recall pondering this, with some interest, inside an organisation that seemed to have a whole fairground of these things that just keep going round, and coming up with a reasonable explanation why. W. Edwards Deming gave us a lovely way to think about systems – which, whether the term excites you or not, is what a business is. He suggested that ninety-four per cent of a business's results are determined by the system: the structures, processes, incentives, goals and constraints that shape everyday work. The remaining six per cent comes down to people. Whether or not you accept the precise figures, the point underneath is still worth pondering: people operate inside something larger than themselves, and that something shapes what's possible.

And yet it's remarkably common to find leaders pouring all their attention into the people while leaving the system entirely untouched. Which is understandable. People are visible; systems feel much harder to see. Though I'd gently argue they aren't really hard to see at all – we're just rarely shown where to look.

Here's the part worth sitting with and what makes this a more positive helter skelter, one that you can get off. When the same problem keeps coming back, the system is telling you something – and the most reliable sign of all is this: when new people, even capable, motivated, experienced ones, produce exactly the same results as the ones before them. At that point it's no longer credible to blame effort or attitude or personality or people. The ride is producing the result; the people are just the ones strapped in. So before we study the people on the helter-skelter, it's worth working out why the helter-skelter behaves the way it does.

And once you start looking at the ride rather than the riders, the same few signals keep appearing. Work queues in the same place every time, which is almost never about effort and almost always about how the work has been structured or let into the system upstream. Certain people become indispensable – nothing moves without them – which looks like strength and is really fragility of the most difficult kind. I once watched a department where the same three people were wanted by every team at once; they burned out, more or less on schedule, and the system simply generated the same demand for whoever came next. Elsewhere, people start skipping steps and working around the process – the frustration and workarounds we're quick to read as a lack of discipline, when they're usually just adaptation and survival. The useful question is never "why won't people follow the process?" but "what is this process doing that people find impossible, pointless, or counterproductive?"

Then there are goals that compete. When two teams are measured on things that pull against each other, the system manufactures conflict and dysfunction by design, and no amount of goodwill will dissolve it. I worked with a company where salespeople were rewarded for closing deals on products the business couldn't yet deliver – and, in a few cases, didn't actually sell. The fallout (overloaded delivery teams, frayed customers, financial strain) was duly blamed on the delivery people, who'd had no say whatsoever in what was sold.

My favourite example, though, is smaller and more telling. In one company the support team fielded the same calls every Monday morning: customers locked out of the platform after forgetting their passwords over the weekend. The support manager built a beautifully efficient process for handling the deluge complete with five new hires, and presented the executives with a glowing report on how well her team was coping. She was applauded, rewarded, held up as an example. And everyone missed the point entirely. The pattern was obvious, predictable and easily fixable, so I suggested a self-serve password reset. A small, cheap fix. The calls simply stopped. When a systemic problem is that clear – frequent, predictable, costly – it wants turning off, not managing more efficiently.

It pays to notice where the time goes, too. When people pour hours into some minor recurring irritation, it's often because the real problem behind it is too big, too cross-functional, or too politically awkward to go near; the small symptom is within reach and the actual cause isn't. And listen for the phrases that close down enquiry – "we don't talk about that here," "that would never work," "we're far too busy to deal with that" – which tend to guard an untested assumption rather than a real obstacle. It usually takes only one or two people willing to study the real problem and lay it out simply and easily to start dismantling those.

Sometimes the distortion comes down from above. I remember a company whose managers returned from every monthly board meeting visibly altered – clipped, impatient, demanding, stressed – because investors wanted faster returns and a board far from the actual flow of work couldn't fathom why the teams couldn't deliver quicker. That pressure cascaded. Steps were skipped to show movement, goals were softened to look reachable, processes were broken to demonstrate activity. Which is the real trap that made things staggeringly worse: showing progress and making progress are not the same thing, and when the urge to look busy overtakes the patience to fix the cause, the problems only compound. Which they did in bucket loads over the course of the year.

None of this asks for a heroic reorganisation or transformation. It asks, mostly, for a different stance – observation before action, curiosity before certainty, and a willingness to sit with the uncomfortable truth Deming's followers like to repeat: that your organisation is, right now, perfectly designed to produce the results it's currently getting.

A few things are worth trying from there.

Start where it's least glamorous. Staple yourself to the work and follow how it actually moves on it's journey, rather than how the process map insists it should, then bring that honest picture to the people who hold the levers – the goals, the incentives, the budgets, the norms, the climate itself.

When something you'd "solved" comes back, take that as the tell that it wasn't solved at all, and keep asking why, one patient layer at a time – the old five whys – until you're looking at a systemic cause and not the latest symptom. Watch where the hours disappear, because that points at the real problem more honestly than any status report. And none of it needs formal authority: even without the levers of change yourself, you can gather the evidence, name the pattern, and make the system visible to someone who can act. Change begins with understanding, and understanding begins with looking at the right thing.

Because here's the hopeful part. Fix the ride, and a surprising number of the "people problems" strapped to it resolve themselves – the burnout, the workarounds, the same weary faces zooming past on the helter skelter. Leave it running, and round and down and up and round we all go. I know which I'd rather have.

And it starts, as most good things at work do, not with action but with a proper look at what's actually going on.