🔧 Swapping Tools to Fix Systemic Issues?

Created on 2025-06-16 18:29

Published on 2025-06-16 19:20

Nice Band-Aid. Too Bad the Patient’s Bleeding Internally.

If you’re been in business enough, you have seen it before. Especially by new teams or colleagues, that need to prove themselves quick and make a mark: “Our processes are broken! Quick—switch project management tool!” “Collaboration sucks? Swap the documentation platform!” “Quality’s down? NEW DEPLOYMENT TOOL. NOW.”

Spoiler: You’ve treated a sneeze while the virus eats the host.

Tools don’t solve culture rot. They amplify it. Crappy communication + Slack = organized chaos. Broken incentives + Linear = shiny dysfunction. Fear of failure + GitHub = prettier technical debt.

Why We Keep Falling for This

Tools feel like “progress” (boards! integrations! dashboards!).
They’re tangible (easier than fixing trust or educating a team on a topic).
We confuse motion with progress (see: The Halo Effect 📚). Even a broken clock gives the correct time twice a day:

A broken system optimizes brokenness - regardless of tools

How to Actually Scratch the Surface

(Hint: leave that research of “best tool to do X” aside for a bit, dust your brain 🧠)

🔍 Diagnose FIRST:

Some of the kinds of problems where it’s tempting to trust the promise of “one more tool will fix it”

🩸 “Initiative anemia” → Are teams waiting for permission to fix obvious problems? (Spoiler: Your “empowerment” speech didn’t work, and the team still doesn’t dare to try anything new)
🎭 Metrics theater → Are dashboards green while customers rage-tweet? (Congratulations on optimizing for vanity)
🔄 Feedback black holes → Do retrospectives output… nothing but venting out? (Hint: Your “action items” are performance art)
🧟 Zombie projects → Is that “high-priority initiative” still breathing? (No, sunk-cost fallacy isn’t a resuscitation tactic)
🏰 Knowledge silos → Do 3 people hold the keys to production? (Your bus factor is 1 - and the bus is heading towards you)
🔇 Silent failures → Are mistakes swept under Jira tickets? (Your “blameless culture” is a “hot potato” dodging exercise) 🛠️ THEN, experiment:

Run a hackweek, “permissionless week”, or some kind of experiement where anyone can fix *any *documented problem, no approval required
Go gather customer feedback. Talk to them, and compare your qualitatity (and anecdotal) data with the dashboards you collected
Get rid of retrospective as a complaining ritual - make them lead to action. Pick one single thing and actually implement a change, and observe the effect.
Spend some “spring cleaning” time, and sunset projects that are drafting. Remove calendar invites, archive out-of-date. documentation
Implement a pairing system where experienced teammates show less experienced ones how to do to the work, and have them document it together - so the rookie teaches another one afterwards
Openly share mistakes, publicly - as a way to signal that it’s ok to make mistakes, as long as learnings are extracted

🚦Where to start? Where you are

Forget about a multi-quarter roadmap, and visualizing the perfect game plan. Take the smallest possible step you can, in the direction of the desired state. The objective is not to solve anything yet - it’s to prove that you are serious about making a change.

Action speaks louder than words. Show the change, lead by doing. If the change starts to root and you hit the limits of the tools that you have: fantastic. It’s time to talk about the next steps - but you have plenty of actions and reflections to take before that.

Tools should ENABLE change - not ENGINEER it. Stop polishing the wreckage, get your x-ray machine and go to the core of the issues.

Image credit: Microsoft Copilot. Prompt: “generate a horizontal image, for the quote “Nice Band-Aid. Too Bad the Patient’s Bleeding Internally”. it should be in a comic strip style, with the text in the middle”