The Fix That Feeds the Problem

Every few years, a city plagued by traffic congestion does what cities do: it builds more roads. And for a while, sometimes months, sometimes a year or two, it works. Commutes ease, frustration falls, and local officials declare the problem solved. Then, slowly, the roads fill back up.

So what happened?

The congestion relief did something nobody intended: it lowered the perceived cost of driving.

People who had been carpooling or using transit now drove alone. Commuters who had lived close to work moved farther out, because the drive was suddenly tolerable. Developers built in areas that had been inaccessible, drawing more residents, more trips, more cars. The roads attracted the very demand they were meant to absorb. Researchers call this induced demand, and it is one of the most reliably documented phenomena in urban planning. In other words, the more road capacity you build, the more of it gets consumed, until congestion returns to roughly its prior level.

Thus, the problem was never the congestion to begin with. The congestion was a symptom of something deeper: a pattern in how people make decisions about where to live and how to move, operating inside a land-use structure that both shapes and responds to those decisions. Addressing the symptom didn't touch that pattern. Rather, it actually entrenched it.

Why do I bring up the systemic underpinnings of traffic patterns, and what does this have to do with intentional leadership? The answer is simple: awareness. Odds are, your organization has its own version of this type of problem. This type of problem is entrenched in how the organization works, and it requires the activity of leadership to call out, diagnose, and ultimately make progress on.

An example of this entrenched patterns might be the quarterly all-hands meeting added to address employee disconnection. Sure, it might succeed at signaling concern to the company. Unfortunately, it fails at resolving the underlying breakdown in how decisions get made and communicated within the organization.

Another example might be the new CRM system purchased to fix a sales pipeline problem. The system needed to be updated, sure. But the underlying disconnect between sales teams keeps a disproportionate amount of work at the hands of the very few, at the expense of learning and development of the many others.

Finally, another example might be the reorganization designed to address a collaboration failure. The new org chart creates fresh reporting lines, and "shakes things up" in order to spur collaboration. But the the old relational dynamics left intact and untouched still linger. That is actually a failure of intra-organizational trust, not an issue an org chart change can fix.

Mind you, these are not bad decisions. They are rational responses to real pain, and they typically produce real, measurable relief in the short term. That is precisely what makes them so durable. When a fix works for six months, it is very hard to argue against it, and very hard to sustain the argument that something deeper needs attention.

But symptomatic fixes share a very common feature: they do nothing to change the conditions that generated the symptom in the first place. In fact, they often reinforce those conditions, because they signal that the problem has been handled. This reduces the urgency, and the organizational will, to do the harder work.

What is the harder work?

In urban planning terms, the harder work is land-use reform. This is the deeply contested conversation about where people should be able to live, what density looks like, how transportation infrastructure shapes community, and who benefits and who bears the cost. These are not technical questions at all, nor do they have easy solutions. This is a prime example of an adaptive challenge, which questions about values, tradeoffs, and loss. They require people to give something up: the single-family home as an investment vehicle, the autonomy of the personal car, a particular vision of neighborhood. That is difficult, slow, politically costly work, and no amount of road building eliminates the need to do it.

In organizational terms, the harder work is usually some version of the same thing: surfacing the real disagreement beneath the presenting problem, naming what would actually have to change, and holding space for the discomfort that comes with that conversation. It is not the kind of work that appears on a project plan. It rarely has a clean deliverable, and it tends to make people uncomfortable in ways that symptomatic fixes do not.

This is why the harder work gets skipped. Not maliciously, nor negligently. In fact, it gets skipped because the symptomatic fix is readily available, it produces visible results, and it forecloses the immediate pressure that might otherwise create momentum for deeper work. The typical question asked in these cases is, "what is the solution?" A better question would be: "is this solution addressing the problem, or is it addressing the discomfort of having the problem?"

So if the same problem keeps returning in new forms, with new urgency, in new departments or cycles, it is worth asking whether every previous intervention addressed the pattern or only the most recent expression of it.

And so, the road fills up once again. The question is whether you are ready to stop building roads, and start having tougher conversations around what it makes to make meaningful change.