The Circles You Cannot See
EMERGENT ENTERPRISE: Post 3 of 15 | Movement I, Part 3 of 5: Why every solution seeds the next problem
You solved the problem. Everyone agreed it was solved. The metrics confirmed it. The case study was written. And then, eighteen months later, you found yourself in a room addressing what everyone carefully avoided calling the same problem—because it couldn’t be. That one was solved.
But here you are.
The presenting symptoms have shifted. New people are involved. The context has evolved. Yet something in the room feels familiar in a way that unsettles more than it clarifies. You’ve been here before. Not in the details, but in the shape of the thing.
This is not failure. This is not even recurrence. This is the system revealing something about its own nature—something your problem-solving mind was never trained to see.
You’ve been thinking in lines. The system operates in circles.
The Tyranny of the Straight Line
Western enterprise runs on linear logic. Problem emerges. Cause identified. Solution implemented. Problem resolved. Next.
This sequence is so deeply embedded in how we structure work that questioning it feels almost nonsensical. Project management methodologies assume it. Performance reviews reward it. Case studies celebrate it. The entire apparatus of organisational improvement rests on the premise that problems are points on a line—you encounter them, you pass them, you move forward.
But as one pioneering systems thinker observed, “Reality is made up of circles but we see straight lines. Herein lie the beginnings of our limitation.”1
The limitation is not in our intelligence. It is in our perception. We have been trained to see sequences where there are cycles, to find endpoints where there are only waypoints, to declare victory in a game that never concludes.
Consider what actually happens when you implement a solution in a living system.
You introduce new information. That information circulates. It encounters the existing relationships and interdependence among parts. Those parts respond—not just to the information itself, but to each other’s responses to the information. Energy shifts. Patterns adjust. Behaviours emerge that were not part of your implementation plan because they could not have been predicted by examining the solution in isolation.
Some of those emergent behaviours create new tensions. Those tensions surface as new problems. And the cycle continues—not because you failed, but because this is how living systems process change.
The solution didn’t fail. It succeeded—at being an input to a circular system. What you interpreted as resolution was actually initiation.
The Feedback Loop as Native Language
Every system speaks in loops. This is not metaphor. It is mechanism.
The primer names this directly: feedback loops are “the system’s language of self-understanding and adaptation.”2 They are the pathways through which systems receive, process, and respond to information. When we observe these loops with care, we gain insight into the system’s inner workings—its hidden dynamics, its pressure points, its capacity for change.
But most enterprise thinking treats feedback as a discrete event. The quarterly review. The customer survey. The post-mortem. Information is gathered, analysed, acted upon, and filed. The loop is administratively closed.
The system, meanwhile, continues looping.
What you filed as “lessons learned” continues circulating. The relationships and interdependence that surfaced the original problem continue operating. The energy that drove the dysfunction continues seeking expression. Nothing stopped because you declared it stopped.
A manufacturing company identified communication breakdown between engineering and production as the root cause of quality issues. The solution: a new cross-functional meeting structure with clear escalation protocols. Implementation was textbook. Quality metrics improved. Success was declared.
Fourteen months later, a different problem emerged: innovation stagnation. New product development had slowed to a crawl. Investigation revealed that the escalation protocols had created risk aversion. Engineers stopped proposing novel approaches because the meeting structure surfaced every deviation as a potential quality issue. The solution to one problem had become the seed of another.
This is not a story of unintended consequences, though it is often narrated that way. It is a story of circular causality functioning exactly as circular causality functions. Information entered the system. The system processed it through its existing relationships and interdependence. New patterns emerged. Those patterns generated new tensions that eventually surfaced as new problems.
The company was not wrong to address the communication breakdown. They were incomplete in their perception of what they were actually doing. They thought they were solving a problem. They were introducing information into a loop.
The Observer in the Circle
Here is where the pattern becomes more demanding.
In the previous posts, we established that you are part of the system you observe. Your presence changes what you measure. Your categories shape what you see. The grey box includes you.
Now add this: the circles include you too.
When you introduce a solution, you are not a technician repairing a machine from outside. You are a node in the network, adding information that will circulate through relationships that include your own. The energy you inject does not move in a straight line from intervention to outcome. It moves through you, around you, and back to you—transformed by every relationship it touches along the way.
This is why the same leader can implement the same approach in two different organisations and get radically different results. The approach is identical. The loops are not. And the leader’s position within each loop is not the same.
The systems thinker who cannot see their own position in the circle will be perpetually surprised by outcomes. They will attribute success to their intervention and failure to resistance, culture, or bad luck. They will not recognise that they are both observer and observed, both cause and effect, both the one introducing information and the one being changed by its circulation.
One of the guiding principles from authentic practice names this precisely: The practice asks us to resist interpreting every interaction among the parts. Instead, we observe the whole circle's movement and allow the system's story to emerge on its own terms.3
The whole circle. Not the segment you can see from where you stand. Not the arc between your action and your preferred outcome. The whole movement—including the part that curves behind you.
Redundancy as Wisdom
Linear thinking treats redundancy as waste. If the problem is solved, why maintain the capacity to solve it again? Efficiency demands we eliminate duplication, streamline processes, remove slack from the system.
Circular thinking sees redundancy differently.
Systems thinkers have mapped what they call the “psychological information range of information-redundancy ratios.”4 Too little redundancy, and the system cannot verify that information has been received and processed correctly. Too much, and the system drowns in repetition. But the optimal point is not zero.
Redundancy creates resilience. It allows the system to check itself, to confirm that what was sent was what was received, to catch distortions before they propagate through the entire loop. What linear thinking dismisses as inefficiency, circular thinking recognises as the system’s immune function.
This explains why organisations that optimise relentlessly for efficiency often become fragile. They have eliminated the redundancy that allowed information to circulate with integrity. They have stripped out the slack that gave the system room to self-correct. They have mistaken leanness for health.
When information stops circulating with fidelity, relationships begin to operate on distortion. Parts respond not to what is actually happening but to corrupted signals about what is happening. Energy that should flow toward the system’s purpose dissipates into noise. The system does not collapse immediately—it degrades gradually, then suddenly.
The circles continue. But what moves through them is no longer coherent enough to sustain the whole.
The Discipline of Seeing Circles
Learning to see circles requires unlearning the line.
This is not a technique to be implemented on Monday morning. It is a perceptual shift that develops over time, through practice, through the repeated experience of watching your linear predictions fail to capture what actually unfolds.
Start here: the next time you declare a problem solved, ask what information you just introduced to the system. Not what action you took—what information now circulates that did not circulate before. Then watch. Not for whether the solution “worked” in the linear sense, but for what the system does with the new information. What relationships does it activate? What energy does it release or redirect? What patterns begin to shift?
You will not see everything. The primer reminds us that complete knowledge of a system is not available to us—only observation over time.5 But you can begin to see more than you saw before. You can begin to notice the curve where you once perceived only the line.
And you can begin to develop what the most seasoned practitioners cultivate: the humility to know that your best intervention is still just an input to a process you do not control.
The circles were there before you arrived. They will continue after you leave. Your opportunity is not to straighten them into lines but to participate in their movement with greater awareness—to add information that generates energy the system can actually use.
This is the cohesion that living systems require: not the false unity of everyone agreeing on a solution, but the dynamic integrity of information circulating through relationships and interdependence, creating and recreating the patterns that hold the whole together.
The problem you solved is not behind you. It is beside you, below you, ahead of you—transformed but not terminated, part of the ongoing conversation the system has with itself.
Learn to see the circles, and you stop being surprised by their return. You start being curious about their movement.
That curiosity is the beginning of a different kind of attention—the kind we will need as we turn, in the next post, to the environment you swim in without seeing.
Next: The Water You Swim In—the environment you cannot perceive is shaping everything you do.
For audio listeners: Thank you for listening. If this way of seeing resonates, subscribe to follow the series — and share it with someone who keeps solving the same problem.
This post is part of the Emergent Enterprise series — a systems thinking exploration of what it means to lead organisations as living systems rather than machines. The series moves from seeing differently, to attending wisely, to practising authentically. Paid subscribers enter the deeper territory of right attention — learning not just what to look at, but how to attend. Founding members access the complete practice, grounded in the RAW Systems Work model from my primer, Emergent Systems Thinking & Authentic Practice with Right Attention. For seekers and practitioners who suspect there is more to their organisation than the org chart reveals.
Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline, on the limitations of linear perception applied to circular systems.
From the primer: feedback loops function as the system's native language—the pathways through which it receives, processes, and responds to what circulates within it.
One of the guiding principles of authentic practice, emphasising observation of the whole over interpretation of parts.
C.A. van Peursen’s work on information-redundancy ratios, as discussed in Kramer and de Smit’s Systems Thinking, exploring how redundancy serves system resilience rather than merely creating inefficiency.
First principle of RAW Systems Work: the system cannot be fully known, only observed over time as its patterns reveal themselves.