Invisible Problems

Zoom in and everything looks fine. Zoom out and you see the inefficiency no one experiences as a problem.

Early in a previous role, I started mapping how content flowed through our ecosystem, from creation through publishing across multiple channels.

What I saw was massive inefficiency. Print writers would craft a piece and hand it off. The web team would take that content and rework it for digital. Each team was doing their job fine, but the organization was paying for the same work twice. Duplicate effort, inconsistent messaging, slow turnaround.

The fix seemed obvious. I proposed a solution where writers created for multiple channels from the start.

The response: resistance. It took me a while to understand why. My solution added complexity to their workflow without solving a problem they experienced firsthand.

What finally overcame the resistance? A reorg. Writers became responsible for both print and digital. They felt the rework pain themselves.

They still thought my solution was nuts, but they began articulating the inefficiency in their own words — and proposing solutions.

My lesson: Sometimes solving a system-level problem means shifting who feels the friction. Once the work and the consequences lived in the same place, the conversation changed, and a solution had room to take hold.

Originally published on LinkedIn