When Good People Keep Getting Bad Outcomes, Look at the Path

There is a pattern I have seen often enough in community safety to recognise it quickly.

Capable, committed people are not producing the outcomes that are expected of them. The response is more training, another reminder, tighter performance management, or a conversation about whether the right people are in the right roles.

Sometimes that response is correct. Sometimes the problem genuinely is capability, or attitude, or fit.

But sometimes the problem is the path.

The Path in Community Safety

Chip Heath and Dan Heath's Switch describes the Path as the environment, the conditions, the route that makes the desired behaviour possible or impossible in practice. When capable people consistently fail to produce the intended outcome, one of the first questions worth asking is whether the path they are working on is designed to support success or to make it unnecessarily difficult.

In community safety, the path is often very difficult indeed.

Consider a referral route that involves multiple steps, different systems that do not communicate with each other, forms that ask for information that is not always available, thresholds that are interpreted differently by different organisations, and no clear feedback on whether the referral was received, acted on or closed. A practitioner navigating that route is not failing because they lack commitment. They are working in a system that has not been designed to make the right thing easy to do.

Or consider a recording requirement that duplicates information already held in another system, that takes longer than the intervention it is recording, and that produces data that nobody appears to use. The practitioner who finds workarounds is not being obstructive. They are responding rationally to a process that does not make sense.

Or consider a partnership process that requires multiple approvals before a decision can be made, where the people with the authority to decide are rarely in the room, and where the escalation route is unclear. The practitioner who stops escalating is not giving up. They have learnt that escalation does not produce results.

Before Reaching for Individual Accountability

The leadership instinct to reach for individual accountability is understandable. It is visible. It is actionable. It produces a clear narrative: this person did not do what was expected, and this is the consequence.

But if the same problem keeps appearing across different people, in different teams, in different organisations, the explanation is unlikely to be individual failure. It is more likely to be a system condition.

This is not a comfortable conclusion. It means that the problem is not easily solved by changing the person. It means looking at the referral route, the recording system, the threshold, the approval process, the information-sharing arrangement, the incentive structure. It means asking who designed this, why it was designed this way, and whether it is still fit for purpose.

That work is slower and less satisfying than a performance conversation. But it is more likely to produce a lasting change.

The Question Worth Asking First

Before concluding that a performance issue is about the individual, it is worth asking: is this person the only one struggling with this, or is this a pattern?

If it is a pattern, the next question is: what is the common factor? Is it the process? The system? The information available? The clarity of the expectation? The support available when things go wrong?

The 4P leadership diagnostic asks whether a problem primarily needs a People, Practice, Partnership or System response. That question is directly relevant here. A system that keeps producing poor outcomes despite good people is a system problem, and it requires a system response.

Are We Asking People to Perform Better Inside a System That Makes Good Performance Unnecessarily Difficult?

That is the question I find most useful when a pattern of poor outcomes is not responding to the usual interventions.

It is not a question that removes individual accountability. People are still responsible for their own practice. But it is a question that asks leaders to look honestly at the conditions they have created, or inherited, or failed to challenge, before placing the full weight of the problem on the individuals working within them.

Good people deserve a path that is designed to support them. When the path is the problem, changing the people will not fix it.

Explore the 4P Community Safety Leadership Framework

This article sits within the Lead Systems domain of the 4P Community Safety Leadership Framework, which explores how leaders understand and influence the wider conditions that shape community safety outcomes.

Explore Lead Systems | Explore the full Leadership Framework