Is It the People or the System?

Technical leaders often chase people when outcomes slip, but the real lever is the system that produces those outcomes. In this hospital story a surgeon-driven authority allowed unsafe habits to persist, and the leadership instinct was to blame the staff. The conversation flips that narrative by asking, "Is the problem the people or the system?" and points directly at system design.

The turning point came when the hospital gave nurses the authority to question a surgeon's hand-washing. By restructuring the decision hierarchy and making the compliance check a shared responsibility, the mortality rate that had been statistically above norm returned to baseline in just seven days. The change wasn't a new policy or training session; it was a redesign of who could act and when, turning a cultural blind spot into a concrete safety net.

For engineering managers the lesson is clear: when performance metrics dip, audit the processes and authority flows before launching blame games. Empowering the right people to intervene-whether that means giving a junior engineer the right to flag a risky deployment or letting a dev-ops team enforce runtime guards-creates a feedback loop that corrects systemic drift quickly. The payoff is measurable, rapid, and sustainable.