THE WAY WE WORK

Why the same problem keeps coming back after you fix it

Audrey Boyle · Brief · November 2026 · 4-minute read

When work goes wrong, we usually name a person: the coworker who said the wrong thing, the manager who should have handled it differently. On the surface that makes sense. In my experience, it’s rarely about that person. People react to the ground they’re standing on, what I call terrain: how the work is set up, what the last restructure left behind, what they were once praised for and keep reaching for. Treat the person and you’re treating a symptom. Gartner found that most large public companies announcing cuts between 2023 and mid-2025 ran three or more rounds, and often still failed to reduce operating expenses.[1] Name the root cause, and you know what you’re treating.

Why do we name a person?

The friction is real, and it deserves empathy. But the person is the part of the problem that’s easiest to see.

What’s actually going on?

Zoom out: how a person works with the people around them, and how that group works against the whole organization. Some of what looks like a person problem is a reaction to something in the system. Some of it is people reaching for the thing they were once recognized for, which may be good enough but isn’t where they’re strongest. From inside the ring, you can’t see the fight. From the stands, you can.

What does a restructure leave behind?

The people who stay: picked or spared, questioning their worth, carrying guilt about the ones who left. All of it goes into their work.

Why does cutting blind fail?

Picture a garden with ten roses and ten lilacs, cut down to five. The lilacs are blooming, so you pull those. You don’t know what’s under the soil until you pull: some roots come out clean, some run deeper than you thought, some leave pieces behind. Decisions made on what’s above ground cut things nobody knew were holding the garden together. Know the roots before you pull the plant.

Where does the terrain sit?

Sometimes it’s the room itself. Home has the laundry. The office has the knock on the door. An open floor lets every conversation bleed over: who left early, who has a family, who isn’t pulling their weight. Leaders feel it most through the open door. You want to be there for your people, and you want them to bring you decisions. A true open door can turn a leader into a stand-in for a dozen roles, when the job is strategy and decisions.

What’s already there?

HR has done real work here, on belonging and on inclusion, and the people who’ve given their careers to it took on something hard to describe. That’s an also, not an instead. The gap is understanding what’s already there before deciding where to go next. People’s own accounts carry their lens and their work persona, and the terrain is more than people: it’s the tools, the resources, the digital spaces and the rooms. Read it as it is, through what people choose to tell you, and never by watching them.

Why call it terrain?

At Named Work, we put it this way: what you call culture, we map as terrain. Culture is the cost nobody has counted. Terrain is the same ground, mapped. Quicksand is not an opinion about the ground. It is a condition of the ground that sets the cost of every step.

What’s still open: How do you find the root cause when everyone in the room is too close to see it?

SOURCES

1. Gartner, press release, September 11, 2025: large public organizations that announced cost-cutting from 2023 to the second quarter of 2025.

Named Work, my leadership continuity firm, maps what a seat holds before anyone decides what to cut.