The reorg fixed it. For a quarter. Then the same tension returned between the same two teams, wearing new job titles.

Ronald Heifetz drew a line between two kinds of problems. Technical ones can be solved with existing expertise: a better process, a clearer structure, a new tool. Adaptive ones can’t, because the problem lives in the people involved: their habits, their loyalties, a loss someone has to accept. After decades studying why leadership fails, his conclusion was that the most common mistake is treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical.

The mistake repeats for a reason. Technical fixes are what leaders are trained to deliver and rewarded for delivering. Each one produces visible action and a season of relief, which reads as progress. And when the problem returns, the lesson drawn is rarely “wrong kind of solution.” It’s “we need a better fix.” So the cycle escalates: new process, new structure, new tool, while the real work goes untouched, because nobody has been asked to do it.

Leaders rarely bring me the same hard problem twice. The problems that return are the ones they had filed as solved.

If something in your organization has now survived two competent fixes, try Heifetz’s question before designing the third: who would have to give up what for this to truly go away? Write down names and losses, not process steps.

Then notice whether anyone has actually been asked.