There is a particular kind of frustration that every founder recognises, even if they cannot immediately name it. You have identified a problem in the business. You have fixed it. You have documented the fix, communicated it to the team, maybe even trained people on it. Six months later the same problem is back, wearing slightly different clothes.
Most founders at this point conclude that the process needs tightening. They add more steps, more checks, more sign-offs. And six months after that, the same problem returns again.
What is actually happening here is something that operational consultants rarely want to say out loud, because it complicates their job considerably: the process was never the problem. The problem was in the human layer around the process, and fixing processes without addressing that layer is why the same issues keep recurring.
I spent a decade noticing this pattern before I could properly explain it. The MSc came later, and with it a body of research that had been quietly saying the same thing for years. Most organisational problems are not process problems. They are psychology problems. The process is just where the symptom shows up.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Every business has two operating systems running simultaneously. The formal one is documented in the process maps and the policy manual and the job descriptions. The informal one lives in the unspoken assumptions, the behavioural norms, the things everyone knows but nobody says. When these two systems are in conflict, the informal one wins. Every time. Without exception.
The evidence on this is not subtle. Change management research has been demonstrating the same finding for decades. Somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of major change programmes fail to achieve their stated objectives. The failure is almost never technical. It is almost always human. People do not resist change because they are difficult. They resist it because the informal system, the real one, has not changed. The new process sits on top of the old behaviour and eventually the old behaviour wins.
What it looks like inside a real business
Here is a pattern I have seen more times than I can count. A founder identifies that the business is losing customers to poor communication during the onboarding process. They bring in a CRM, define the touchpoints, assign responsibilities, build the sequence. Technically, the problem is solved. The process is right.
Six months later, onboarding is still losing customers. When you look carefully at why, you find that the team is broadly following the process for new customers, but skipping steps for customers who feel "easy" or "low risk" because that is what they have always done with easy customers. Nobody decided to ignore the process. Nobody is being difficult. But the informal norm, the shortcut that was always fine before, is still operating underneath the formal system. The process changed. The behaviour did not.
The diagnosis that leads to a lasting solution looks different from the one that leads to a tighter process. It asks why the shortcut existed in the first place. What does the team believe about those customers? What does the incentive structure reward? What has leadership historically accepted? What does success look like from inside the team, not from the outside?
These are not soft questions. They are precise questions about the conditions that create a particular behaviour. Answering them accurately is what separates a fix that sticks from one that does not.
The role of leadership in all of this
There is something founders find uncomfortable about this framing, and I have learned to say it directly rather than dance around it. In most SMEs, the primary source of the informal operating system is the founder. The behaviours the founder models, tolerates, rewards and ignores are the actual culture of the business. The stated values are aspirational. The founder's consistent behaviour is operational reality.
This is not a criticism. It is a structural observation about how small organisations work. The founder's behaviour is extraordinarily visible in a way that it simply is not in larger organisations, and the team takes its cues from it accordingly. If the founder treats process as optional under pressure, the team learns that process is optional under pressure. If the founder avoids difficult conversations, the team learns that difficult conversations are not how this business operates. None of this is deliberate. All of it is consequential.
The question stops being "what is wrong with the process" and starts being "what in our collective behaviour is producing this outcome." That second question leads somewhere useful.
A more useful starting point
When I am working with a founder on an operational problem that keeps recurring, the first thing I want to understand is not the process. It is the context around the process. What does the team believe about this area of the business? What does success feel like to them from the inside? What gets rewarded, officially and unofficially? What has been tolerated?
Once you understand those things, the process question becomes much simpler. Sometimes the process is fine and the problem is a specific behaviour that needs addressing directly. Sometimes the process needs changing, but in a way that works with the grain of how the team actually operates rather than against it. Sometimes the issue is one person whose behaviour is setting the norm for everyone around them.
The answer is almost never "we need a better process." The answer is almost always more human than that. Which is, I would argue, a considerably more interesting problem to work on.