Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences:
Whenever I ask people about the biggest recurring problem in their organization, I am struck by how often the answer is the same: people.
Pablo Neruda’s We Are Many made me wonder whether one reason people remain so difficult to understand is that none of us is quite the same person in every circumstance.
Whenever I am in a networking or social setting and the conversation turns to business, I often ask a question:
What is the biggest recurring problem in your organization?
I am continually struck by how often the answer is some version of the same thing.
PEOPLE!
People don’t communicate. People don’t take responsibility. People resist change. People don’t follow through. People don’t work well together. People don’t understand what is expected of them.
And these aren’t necessarily struggling organizations. Some are successful. Some are profitable. Some have good leaders, talented employees and strong reputations.
Yet people remain difficult to understand.
Organizations don’t necessarily succeed because they have somehow solved the people problem.
Sometimes they succeed while still carrying unresolved people dynamics, and there may be unrealized capacity, performance and possibility sitting inside those dynamics.
Recently, while reading Karl Weick’s Sensemaking in Organizations, (a difficult but important read), I encountered Pablo Neruda’s poem We Are Many. Weick introduces the poem in a discussion about identity and sensemaking, and I found myself thinking about all those conversations in which someone had told me that their recurring problem was people.
What follows isn’t intended as a literary analysis of Neruda. It is what I found myself hearing in the poem.
Neruda begins with the difficulty of answering what appears to be one of the simplest questions we can ask ourselves:
Who am I?
His answer, essentially, is that he cannot find a single person…there are many.
That immediately complicates how we think about people in organizations. We tend to speak about someone as though there is one stable person to understand. She is difficult. He is unreliable. She lacks confidence. He doesn’t communicate. They resist change.
But what if the person we are describing isn’t quite as fixed as our description suggests?
Neruda then turns to the self we present to others.
He describes wanting to appear intelligent while keeping the foolish parts of himself out of sight.
There is the person I experience myself to be, and there is the person I want you to experience.
We all manage that gap to some degree.
We learn what belongs in the meeting and what stays outside it. We learn what confidence looks like in our organization. We discover which questions are safe to ask, which mistakes can be admitted, which disagreements are welcome and which ones carry a price.
So the person an organization sees may not be the entirety of the person they think they are experiencing.
Then Neruda changes the circumstances.
Among distinguished people, another version of him appears. He encounters someone more frightened, uncertain and uncomfortable.
The context has changed, and so has the self that emerges within it.
This matters enormously in organizations because behaviour doesn’t happen in isolation.
The employee who speaks freely with peers may become silent in front of a particular manager. Someone who takes initiative in one team may wait for instructions in another. A person who appears resistant during one change initiative may have championed another. Someone labelled difficult by one leader may flourish under the next.
The question, then, is not only Who is this person? – It is also: Who does this environment allow, encourage or require this person to become?
Neruda pushes the idea further.
When a house catches fire, he imagines calling for the person equipped to respond. Instead, another version of himself appears. There is the person I imagine I will be when something happens, and then there is the person who actually shows up when it does.
Organizations encounter this all the time.
- A set of values says one thing. Pressure arrives and behaviour says another.
- A leader believes they welcome dissent until someone strongly disagrees with them.
- A team believes it collaborates well until resources become scarce.
- An organization says it values innovation until an experiment fails.
Circumstances don’t merely test what people say they believe…they can reveal versions of people that ordinary circumstances never bring to the surface.
Neruda then looks outward at the heroes he encounters in books and films.
They seem so sure of themselves yet maybe, this is another trap.
We experience ourselves from the inside, contradictions and all, while experiencing other people largely through what they show us.
We see the decisive CEO, not necessarily the uncertainty before the decision. We see the confident colleague, not the internal conversation preceding the presentation. We see someone’s behaviour and construct an explanation for it without access to everything producing it.
Neruda then summons his own hero.
Sadly, the preferred version doesn’t arrive. This is one of the most human moments in the poem.
We cannot always command the version of ourselves we would prefer to show up when we need it most
Eventually, Neruda longs for a way to summon the “real” person underneath all these different selves and his poem begs another question:
What if all of them are real?
What if human beings are not fixed entities carrying one predictable identity from room to room, but people continually responding to context, relationships, expectations, power, experience and our own evolving understanding of who we are?
By the end of the poem, Neruda wonders whether other people experience the same multiplicity he does. I suspect that question is where the poem connects most powerfully to organizations.
If one person can contain that many possible selves, consider what happens when we put dozens, hundreds or thousands of people together.
- Add hierarchy.
- Add history.
- Add personalities.
- Add incentives.
- Add power.
- Add ambition.
- Add fear.
- Add belonging.
- Add competition.
- Add different interpretations of the same event.
Then ask everyone to work toward a common objective.
Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that when I ask about the biggest recurring problem in an organization, I so often hear: People – yet there is another layer:
The person telling me that people are the problem is also a person.
Weick makes an important observation after presenting Neruda’s poem.
Our understanding of who we are affects how we define what is happening “out there.” At the same time, what happens around us helps shape our definition of ourselves.
That means the person observing the people problem isn’t standing outside it.
I interpret you partly through who I am. You respond to me partly through who I am being with you. I interpret your response. You interpret mine, and somewhere inside that loop, we may eventually decide:
You are the problem.
This is why I don’t think the answer “people” should be dismissed. People may indeed be central to the challenge, but ‘people’ is not yet a diagnosis.
If someone tells me their recurring problem is people, I want to know more.
Which people? What are they doing? Under what circumstances? With whom? When does the behaviour appear? When doesn’t it? What seems to bring out this particular version of them? What conditions surround the behaviour? What might the organization itself be reinforcing? And what role might the person describing the problem be playing in the dynamic?
A profitable organization can carry unresolved people problems for years.
Success doesn’t necessarily mean those dynamics have been understood. It may simply mean the organization has been successful despite them, and that my friends, leaves an interesting possibility:
What additional capacity might become available if we understood them better?
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges in organizations isn’t simply managing people, but understanding people well enough to resist fixing what we have not yet understood.
Strategic Reflection Prompt
When you say “people are the problem” in your organization, what do you actually know about what is driving the behaviour you are seeing, and what have you simply assumed?
About Giselle
Most costly decisions begin with a wrong read of the situation.
I’m Giselle Hudson — The Pre-Fixer. I help leaders see the real problem before they act, in my writing and in my work. I don’t fix; I pre-fix. Most advisers jump to solutions before they’ve found the real problem. I find it first — the part that isn’t fully visible yet. Once we see that clearly, everything else falls into place, and confident, right action can follow.
Through my daily Strategic Alignment Journal, I explore leadership, decision-making, and the patterns that shape organizations — helping leaders make sense of complexity before they commit significant time and money to the wrong thing.
What’s the one thing about your business that frustrates you most — the thing that, despite your best efforts, you can’t seem to resolve?
