Leadership + Organizational Learning
When I opened Murphy Junior High in 2012, I inherited something I didn’t fully understand yet.
About half of my new staff transferred from other schools in the district, and most of them came from a single building. They brought their experience with them, which is exactly what you’d want; except that experience also carried systems, habits, language, and assumptions about how a school should work. And when you mix that with staff coming from other places, what you get isn’t a new school. You get a cobbled-together version of several old ones.
I didn’t see it at first. What I saw was a staff that was polite, willing, and working hard. What I didn’t see was that we had become a building full of independent contractors. Teachers made their own decisions about what to teach and how to teach it. Outcomes varied wildly. No one owned success. No one owned failure. And a student’s experience on our campus depended almost entirely on which classroom they walked into.
We had a teacher lottery. And in any lottery, someone has to lose.
Every System Is Perfectly Designed
W. Edwards Deming said it plainly: “Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does.”
I’ve carried that sentence into every organization I’ve worked with since. It’s clarifying in a way that’s uncomfortable, because it removes the most common escape route leaders take when outcomes disappoint them.
It’s not the people. It’s not the economy. It’s not the students, the market, or the generation entering the workforce. If you don’t like the results you’re getting, you have a systems problem. And systems problems require systems solutions; not training initiatives, not motivational offsites, not a new set of core values printed on a poster in the break room.
Most organizations treat symptoms. They identify a performance gap and schedule a training. They notice misalignment and send a memo. They see inconsistent outcomes and add a layer of accountability. None of that touches the system. It just creates the appearance of action while the system keeps producing exactly what it was designed to produce. I’ve written about what that pattern looks like specifically with data, and the dynamic is remarkably consistent across sectors.
Abdication Is Also a Design Decision
Here’s the part that took me longer to learn: systems don’t wait for leaders to pay attention.
When leaders are unclear, disengaged, or simply too busy to define how things should work, the system doesn’t stay empty. It gets built anyway, by the people most affected by it, solving for the problems they can see, using the tools they have, based on the experience they’re carrying from somewhere else.
That’s what happened at Murphy. Nobody was being difficult. Nobody was undermining the mission. Every teacher on that staff was doing exactly what they thought they should do, based on their training, their experience, and their best professional judgment. The problem was that their training varied, their experience came from different places, and nobody had clearly defined what we were building together.
The system we got was the system those conditions were designed to produce.
And when I tried to change it through training alone, I learned the second hard lesson: you cannot train your way out of a systems problem. We ran professional development. We shared research. We had conversations about best practice. And then people went back to their classrooms and did what they had always done, because the system hadn’t changed. Only the information had.
The Hard Stop
After a couple of years, it became clear that incremental adjustment wasn’t going to be enough. We needed a hard stop.
Not a reorganization. Not a new initiative. A genuine pause to ask: what are we actually trying to build, and is what we’re doing right now designed to build it?
What came out of that process was harder to say than it sounds. We had to articulate a clear vision; not a mission statement, but a specific, non-negotiable commitment. We were going to reduce the variability of students’ experiences in our classrooms. A student should not win or lose based on which teacher’s room they walked into. That standard had to be shared, or it meant nothing.
We also had to name what we were going to stop doing, and we had to build a common language for talking about teaching and learning. That second part was delicate. When you tell a staff that the vocabulary is changing, some people hear that everything they’ve done was wrong. It isn’t true, and I said so directly. These were professionals who had done exactly what they believed was right, with the training they’d received, inside the paradigms they’d been given. Some of those paradigms were simply older than the research.
What made the difference wasn’t the clarity of the vision. It was the guarantee that came with it: your voice matters in how we build this, and I will not change course without coming back to the table with you. Co-creation with accountability; not consensus for its own sake, but a commitment that the people most affected by the system would have a real role in designing it. That changed things.
What This Means for Your Organization
If you are an L&D leader, an organizational leader, or anyone responsible for how a team performs, Deming’s sentence is worth sitting with longer than it’s comfortable to sit with it.
What results are you getting that you don’t want? Follow that thread back far enough and you will find a system. Not a person, not an attitude problem, not a skills gap that another workshop will close. A system, designed either by intention or by the accumulated decisions of people trying to solve their own problems in the absence of clear direction.
The question isn’t whether your organization has systems. It does. The question is whether you built them, or whether they built themselves while you were focused on something else.
Co-creation is slower than deciding and announcing. It requires leaders to stay at the table when the conversation gets uncomfortable, and to honor the guarantee that people’s voices will actually shape the outcome. But it produces something that top-down system design almost never does: people who understand why the system works the way it does, because they helped build it.
That understanding is what makes change stick.
If your outcomes aren’t what you want them to be, the system is telling you something. The only question is whether you’re ready to listen to it, and whether you’re willing to bring the right people into the room when you do. Start there. Everything else follows.
Want to think through what this looks like in your organization?
Schedule a conversation or explore more at livelearnandlead.com.
Visit Live. Learn. Lead.Brent J. Anderson, Ed.D. is a Learning & Development leader, facilitator, and organizational effectiveness consultant with 20+ years of experience designing and delivering high-impact programs for adult learners. He is the founder of Live. Learn. Lead. Consulting and the author of From Chaos to Order (forthcoming).