June 15, 2026·
post
Touchy topic...You’re not dealing with bad people. You’re dealing with bad systems that ke…
Touchy topic...You’re not dealing with bad people. You’re dealing with bad systems that keep producing the same bad behaviour.
Most people in India have lived this script: unnecessary delays, careless service, “kal aana”, no ownership, passing the buck, broken processes. So the frustration is real. But the root issue is often not the individual; it’s systems, incentives, and culture.
- Low accountability: weak consequences for poor work, weak rewards for great work. If nothing happens either way, mediocrity becomes the status quo.
- Process over outcome: most workplaces reward attendance, hierarchy, and metrics over actually solving the problem. Boxes ticked, TAT met, customer still suffering. (Business too, but if a business runs on bad systems, it should feel the consequences. That’s what markets are for).
- Undertraining: people are put into roles with negligible training, bad tools, no mentorship, then expected to “figure and manage somehow”. And because mistakes are treated as personal failure, not learning signals. People default to defending and working around errors (creating bloat) than fixing them and moving forward.
- Overload and understaffing: one person doing the work of three becomes slow, irritable, and error-prone. Especially visible in customer-facing roles in a high-volume, low-margin environment where speed is demanded, but capacity is not funded.
- Learned helplessness: after years inside broken systems, people stop believing effort changes anything. They do the minimum, avoid making too much noise and emotionally clock out.
- Customers shape behavior too: constant aggression, extended bargaining, disrespect, and unrealistic expectations. “Customer is king” gets misread as “staff are tools.” That mindset is poisonous.
- Talent mismatch: some people are in jobs they never wanted, took out of necessity, or simply aren’t suited for. Hazy career ladders, gatekeeping and poor support can make it feel impossibly tough step to take. Survival trumps fit.
And the hardest part: escalations are often useless because the next layer is equally ineffective. Pointing it out can make you look like the problem. The system gaslights people into accepting lower standards. You’re not dealing with one bad system, but a system of bad systems feeding into each other making finding the happiest path an exception, not the norm.
Put capable people in chaotic systems, you keep chaos. Put average people in strong systems, you often get decent outcomes. Put adaptive people in chaotic system and you often get progress (however inefficient and deceiving). Put good people in strong systems and...you can take over the world.
Disclaimer: Created by me. Assembled with AI.
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