Bring people back to the office, adopt AI quickly, reduce the workforce: each decision is defensible on its own. However, they often leave the organisation working harder and performing worse.
Over the last few years, three leadership decisions affecting medium to large enterprises are making the front pages. As the disruption of remote work settled after COVID, many leaders read falling engagement and weakening cohesion as a problem of presence, and brought people back to fix it.
More recently, “adopt AI quickly”, and “reduce the workforce” joined it. Each one responds to real signals: the wish to regain alignment and control, the pressure to always be more efficient, and the need to stay competitive on cost.
And yet, the result usually is more friction, lost talent, and slower progress. This suggests the problem lies somewhere other than the decisions or that they only address causes and popular discourse rather than the roots.
Most organisations are solving problems in the wrong place. Return to the office is the clearest example. What presents as a problem of presence, is usually a symptom of something deeper:
- unclear priorities
- a process that hinders the flow of work and decisions
- a lack of empowerment and attention to colleagues’ and clients’ experience.
Mandating attendance treats where the problem shows up, not where it starts, and can reinforce the very disengagement it was meant to solve.
The same logic then repeats. Slow delivery becomes “teams are not fast enough”, so AI is brought in for speed. Cost pressure becomes “we are overstaffed”, so headcount is cut. Each reaction is locally rational, and each one targets the symptom rather than the cause.
The four lenses of Value, Flow, Quality, and Experience, are four complementary ways to read an organisation’s system of work. Applied to these three decisions, they show why the combination misfires.
Through the Experience lens, the cost of the return-to-office decision shows first. Where trust has already eroded and friction is rising, a presence mandate accelerates both, and the people with the most options leave first. The mandate tries to fix an experience problem created elsewhere in the system, and rarely reaches that cause.
Through the Value lens, the question is whether the organisation is solving the right problems at all. Everything already feels important, initiatives multiply, and teams stay busy while their impact stays unclear. AI investment and headcount cuts amplify this: more output, less clarity about whether any of it is the work that matters.
Through the Flow lens, what looks like a productivity problem is a movement problem. Work waits on dependencies and decisions, and starts faster than it finishes. Adding pressure or removing people constrains flow further, because the constraint was never individual effort.
Through the Quality lens, systems under pressure let expectations blur and push validation too late, until rework becomes normal. AI adds speed, and speed without quality built in accelerates waste rather than value.
The cocktail, then, is three decisions each reaching for a visible symptom: the office mandate for control, AI for efficiency, the layoffs for cost. Across the lenses they compound, Experience deteriorating, Value unclear, Flow constrained, Quality unstable, into a system that works harder and performs worse.
The four lenses change the question from “what should we fix?” to where the problem comes from, which lens holds the tension, and what the rest of the system does if this one thing changes. The issue is often not presence but Experience, not delivery but Value, not capability but Flow. Fixing the right one is what moves the outcome.
So before the next decision, three questions are worth sitting with:
- Are we solving the problem, or the place it shows up?
- Which lens are we looking through, and which are we ignoring?
- And is the answer we’ve landed on the one that’s easiest to defend at the next board meeting, or the one that actually fixes the system?