HUMAN SYSTEMS AND PEOPLE PROBLEMS
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
WHY SYMPTOM FOCUSED FIXES IN MENTAL HEALTH, HUMAN RESOURCES AND LEADERSHIP KEEP FAILING, AND HOW WHOLE SYSTEM PEOPLE OPERATIONS CREATE BETTER BUSINESS PERFORMANCE.
WHY SYMPTOM BASED THINKING LIMITS HUMAN HEALTH AND CREATE ORGANISATIONAL PEOPLE PROBLEMS
We keep falling in love with symptoms.
In health, in work, in leadership, we are endlessly drawn to what is most visible and most narratable. Stress, anxiety, low mood. Burnout. Skills gaps. Leadership issues. They are all real. But they are also just the dashboard lights of a much deeper operating model.
From a human systems perspective, it is baffling how neatly we keep trying to separate what cannot be separated.
We talk about mental health as if it floats above a body that is sleep deprived, under fuelled, over inflamed, barely moving, constantly stimulated.
We talk about physical health as if our thinking patterns, emotional load, relationships, values and environment are optional extras, not constant inputs into our biology and physiology.
Very rarely is there a mental health challenge without deep physical drivers.
Very rarely is there a physical issue without meaningful cognitive and emotional contributors.
But our language, and our interventions, still slice humans into parts.
It is inaccurate and dangerous.
The moment we oversimplify a complex system, we constrain the interventions we are prepared to try. We create blind spots that feel logical.
If I anchor purely to mental health, I will reach for mindset tools, therapy, time off, boundaries. All incredibly valuable. But if I ignore chronic sleep restriction, nutrient depletion, lack of daylight, no movement, constant digital stimulation, and a nervous system that never gets to down regulate, I am tinkering at the surface.
If I anchor purely to physical health, I might fix a diet, add strength training, clean up alcohol. But if the person’s daily cognitive load is unsustainable, they are marinating in uncertainty, living in unresolved or values conflict, operating without clarity on their own values, or running on constant self criticism, their biology will keep being driven into threat states. The body keeps score of all of it.
The unit of analysis should be human health. The whole system. Brain, body, behaviour, environment, meaning. Not separate verticals we treat with different hashtags.
This is what it looks like to start asking for the root cause of people problems in our own lives, rather than just treating what hurts most today.
THE SAME PATTERN IN BUSINESS AND PEOPLE OPERATIONS
Exactly the same pattern shows up in business and people operations.
We anchor to the visible symptom and build an entire narrative around it:
We have a leadership problem
We have a skills gap
We cannot find good people
Engagement is low
These are the organisational equivalents of stress and burnout. Important, but still symptoms.
The typical response is to firefight the symptom. Leadership program. Training calendar. Recruitment campaign. Engagement initiative. None of these are wrong. They are just incomplete. They are the mental health without sleep equivalent in organisational design.
Underneath those symptoms sit deep, often invisible elements of the operating model:
how work is actually structured
how decisions get made
what is rewarded and what is quietly tolerated
the capacity versus demand equation
where information flows and where it jams
the real, not stated, expectations of leaders
You can pour a lot of money into leadership development and still have a system that makes good leadership almost impossible. You can obsess over skills gaps and still have work designed so poorly that skills cannot be practised, reinforced or transferred. You can complain about people issues when you are really observing system behaviour.
If you want to address the root cause of people problems in business, this is the layer you have to look at.
FROM RESILIENCE AND SKILLS GAPS TO SYSTEM DESIGN
Humans and organisations are whole systems. They adapt to the constraints and incentives around them, often very logically. When we reduce that to resilience on the individual side, or just hire better people on the business side, we flatten complexity into a story that feels manageable and then wonder why the patterns do not change.
As someone educated in humans as integrated systems, this is the thread I keep coming back to:
What if we stopped treating anxiety as purely mental, and burnout as purely psychological, and instead designed lives that respect human biology, cognitive limits and values limits.
What if we stopped treating people problems in business as isolated HR issues, and instead re architected operating models end to end, roles, rhythms, feedback loops, incentives, decision rights.
What if skills gaps were a design brief, not a blame label, prompting us to redesign how skills are actually acquired, practised and used in the flow of work.
This is the shift from chasing individual resilience to deliberately designing human systems, people problems into the way the organisation actually works: acknowledging that what looks like a people issue is often a system doing exactly what it was built to do.
A BETTER QUESTION FOR LEADERS AND ORGANISATIONS
The more I look at it, the more it feels like we need to upgrade our default question.
From:‘What is the problem and how do we fix it quickly?’
To:‘What system produced this pattern, and what would we have to change so this pattern is no longer the most logical outcome?’
That question works for mental health.
It works for physical health.
And it works when you are serious about finding the root cause of people problems in your organisation, not just asking human resources or people operations to tidy up the symptoms.
It is true in our bodies. It is true in our organisations. And it asks us to resist the comfort of simple stories about complex operating models.
Human systems, people problems. If we are willing to look at both together, that is where real commercial performance and human sustainability start to align.
We're here to do just that: hello@ahumanedge.com
