Your System Isn’t Broken - It’s Working Perfectly.
By Chris Morris, Managing Partner, Board Veritas
Most CEOs I talk to are quietly convinced they're bad at hiring.
They aren't.
But they've cycled through two or three people in the same role and watched each one come apart in roughly the same place. Different person, same result. After a while it stops feeling like a hiring problem and starts feeling like a personal failure.
Here's the pattern I keep seeing. When the same seat keeps breaking talented people, the system around that seat is producing exactly the result it was designed to produce. The incentives, the information flow, the role design, and the decision rights are all working. Just not for the outcome you want. That is organizational systems thinking. The system isn't broken. It's set up for a result nobody chose on purpose.
That reframe changes what to do next.
Key Takeaways
— When talented people keep failing in the same role, the system is producing its designed output. It isn't a hiring problem.
— A role is a design object. Decision rights, information access, support, and unwritten expectations shape outcomes more than talent.
— The system that produces repeat failure lives in the room where decisions about the role get made. Not in the org chart.
— Real governance helps the CEO ask whether the seat itself is set up to fail. Most boards skip that question.
— The shift from "who's failing?" to "what about this structure makes this outcome the predictable result?" is the move that changes the cycle.
The seat that keeps breaking people
You hired carefully this time. You ran a real process, checked references, made the offer thoughtfully. You gave the new person six months. And now you're sitting across from the same outcome you sat across from last year.
Each person you hired into that seat saw the same thing. They read the role honestly, found a gap between what the job description promised and what the work actually required, and did their best inside a structure that wasn't built for them to succeed. None of them were wrong. They were reading the situation correctly.
Gallup's research backs this up. Only 46% of employees strongly agree they know what is expected of them at work, down from 56% a few years ago. When more than half the workforce is unclear on what success looks like, the idea that repeat turnover is a character problem starts to look thin.
So the question isn't who you should have hired differently. It's whether you've been hiring for the wrong role.
The system behind the seat
Before we go further, let's separate two things.
A job description is what you wrote down.
A role is what someone actually has to do to succeed.
The key word is design.
A role is a bundle of decisions someone gets to make, information they have access to, support they can ask for, and expectations nobody wrote down. When those pieces are misaligned, the talent of the person in the chair almost stops mattering. The design wins.
Donella Meadows said it plainly: system structure is the source of system behavior. What that means for organizations is that the seat itself is a design object. Change the person without changing the design, and you get the same result.
Here's an example that stays with me. I had a private equity firm that figured this out, though they didn't know they'd figured it out at first. They hired a CFO with strong credentials, but that's not why he worked. He had an unusual ability to walk into a portfolio company, understand the business model quickly, and explain it in a way the people running it could actually use.
They deployed him to one company. It worked. They moved him to another. Same result. Then another. The fit held every time, across very different businesses.
What's interesting is they didn't start by naming what made him work. It was only after watching the pattern repeat that someone could say why. The thing that made him succeed was the thing they had no language for when they hired him.
The competency that mattered most was the one the system had no way to recognize.
So where does this system live? Not in the org chart.
The room where the role gets decided
Think about what happens before the next hire. Someone drafts the job description. A committee reviews candidates. A few people interview the finalists. At every step, there is one question almost nobody asks: is this role set up for anyone to actually succeed in?
That question doesn't get asked because asking it is expensive. It implicates the people who built the structure, approved the budget, wrote the last job description. So everyone skips the structural question and goes to the personnel question instead. Who should we hire this time?
The board's job isn't just to approve the next hire. It's to make it safe to say the role itself is broken before the next person walks into it.
Research on psychological safety says the same thing in different words. When people can name what isn't working without being penalized for it, the team catches problems earlier. When they can't, the same mistakes get repeated with better documentation.
Naming the problem isn't the same as solving it. So what actually changes the outcome?
The question that changes the outcome
One executive director went through three development directors in four years. Each was talented. Each failed the same way. They couldn't build the donor relationships the organization needed because the CEO was still the primary relationship for every major donor and had never transferred that responsibility.
The role was titled Development Director. The system was designed for a Development Supporter.
The fourth hire worked. Not because she was better. Because the CEO finally asked a different question: "What would this role need to look like for someone to actually succeed in it?"
The answer required changing what the CEO did, not who she hired. She transferred key donor relationships. She restructured the reporting line. She made the development director a peer in strategy conversations, not a report. The person who came in after that redesign is still there. Three years and counting.
The CEO told me later: "I stopped asking why I kept hiring wrong. I started asking what I kept designing wrong. Different question. Completely different answer."
That's the shift. From the personnel question to the structural one. Asked honestly, in the right room, that question is worth more than any executive search.
Final thoughts
If you've been cycling through people in the same seat, that tells you something about the design. It doesn't tell you something about your judgment. You built that structure in good faith for a moment that made sense at the time. The seat worked for where you were. It just hasn't caught up to where you are now.
Most CEOs I talk to carry this pattern privately. They wonder if they're bad at hiring, bad at managing, bad at seeing what's right in front of them. They're almost never any of those things. They're running a good process inside a structure that needs redesigning.
You won't hire your way out of this. But you can design your way out of it.
Picture the next time that role opens. Instead of starting with a candidate slate, you start with one question: what would this role need to look like for someone to actually succeed in it? That's a question the structure can answer. The next hire can't.
If that sounds like your organization, you're not alone. That pattern has a name. And it has a fix.
— Chris Morris
Managing Partner & Transformation Architect
REFERENCES
— Meadows, Donella. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008. Meadows's principle that system structure is the source of system behavior grounds the Section 2 reframe from personnel problem to design problem.
— Gallup. State of the Global Workplace and Q12 Meta-Analysis, 2024–2025. Gallup's finding that only 46% of employees strongly agree they know what is expected underpins the Section 1 argument that role clarity is a design variable, not a character trait.
