You've felt it. The customer service maze that leads nowhere. The subscription that took nine seconds to start and three weeks to cancel. The same intake form filled out three times for three people who already have your information.

It's tempting to assume somebody chose this. A greedy executive, a lazy team, a technology that ruined everything. But almost nowhere did anyone wake up and decide to make the experience worse. What happened is subtler, and it's happening inside your organization right now.

It's called suboptimization — when every part of a system starts optimizing for itself instead of the whole. Marketing hits its growth number. Support cuts average call time. Operations trims cost. Finance improves the margin. Every scorecard is green, and the human moving through all of it has a terrible experience. From inside any one department, the decisions look responsible. That's what makes this so hard to catch.

Then Goodhart's Law does the rest: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. Sociologists call it goal displacement. Serving the customer becomes hitting the KPI. Developing people becomes completing the review form. Building culture becomes raising the engagement score. Wells Fargo's "eight is great" cross-selling goal was clear and legitimate — until employees opened millions of accounts nobody asked for. Most of them weren't criminals. They were rational people responding to a fragmented system that had taught them what actually mattered.

Which means better organizations won't come from one big revolution. They'll come from leaders making thousands of smaller decisions differently:

• Design systems that reward cooperation, not silo protection. If every team is measured only on its own lane, no one owns the seams between them — and the seams are where people actually experience your company.
• Create environments where people can safely surface reality. Fragmentation gets worse when acknowledging it feels risky, so build at least one channel where messy, unpolished truth can travel upward intact.
• Give managers enough autonomy to actually lead. A manager who can only enforce the process isn't leading; they're a compliance layer, and they can't fix the problems they're closest to.
• Use metrics as tools, not identities. The moment a number is tied to someone's bonus or job security, it stops describing reality and starts producing performance.
• Remember that efficiency is not the same thing as effectiveness. Speed and cost are easy to count; trust, meaning, and belonging are not — which is exactly why organizations drift toward the first two.
• Refuse to let optimization become the entire purpose. Structure should support human work, not the other way around, and knowing the difference is most of the job.

You don't need to fix your whole organization this quarter. Pick one journey that crosses three departments, map what it actually feels like end to end, and find out which local metric is quietly wrecking it. That's usually enough to see the pattern everywhere else.

I went deep on all of this — including what Nvidia and KPMG are doing to resist the drift — in my newest video. It's the longest one I've made, and I'd genuinely like to know if you think I got it right.

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