The most frustrating thing about sticky plaster solutions isn't that organisations apply them. It's that they're applied by smart people who already know they won't work. Understanding why that happens is the first step to doing something different.
Every experienced leader has been in this situation. A problem surfaces — a performance issue, a cultural friction, a structural dysfunction that keeps producing the same bad outcomes. Someone proposes a solution. The solution is adopted. It helps, a little, for a while. Then the problem resurfaces, perhaps in a slightly different form. Another solution is proposed. The cycle repeats.
The solutions are the sticky plasters. They address the symptom rather than the cause. They provide temporary relief without resolving the underlying condition. And in most cases, the people applying them know they are sticky plasters while they are applying them.
This is the paradox that sits at the heart of most organisational underperformance. It isn't a lack of intelligence. It isn't a lack of resources. It is something more interesting — and more solvable — than either of those things.
Why smart people choose the sticking plaster
The psychological mechanisms that lead intelligent, well-intentioned leaders to choose solutions they know are inadequate are well-documented in behavioural science. Three are particularly relevant to the organisational context.
Present bias — the immediate is more compelling than the important
Daniel Kahneman's research on cognitive biases (2011) describes present bias as the tendency to give more weight to immediate outcomes than to future ones, even when we know rationally that the future outcome matters more. In an organisational context, this manifests as a preference for the solution that relieves the immediate pressure — even when that solution is known to be temporary — over the harder work of fixing the root cause, which will take longer and be more disruptive before it gets better.
Kahneman, D. (2011) 'Thinking, Fast and Slow'. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
A performance problem in a team is causing friction with customers. The immediate pressure is the customer complaint. The sticky plaster is a personal intervention by a senior leader to smooth the situation. The root cause — a structural accountability issue or a management capability gap — remains unaddressed. The cycle will repeat, but not today. Today, the pressure is relieved.
Loss aversion — the fear of making things worse
Kahneman and Tversky's foundational work on Prospect Theory (1979) established that the pain of a loss is approximately twice as powerful as the pleasure of an equivalent gain. In an organisational context, this creates a powerful bias against interventions that carry risk of making things worse in the short term — even when the long-term benefit is clear and the cost of inaction is mounting.
Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A. (1979) 'Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk', Econometrica, 47(2), pp. 263–292.
The leader who knows that the real fix requires a structural change — one that will create disruption, uncertainty and probably some short-term performance decline before it improves — faces a genuine psychological barrier. The sticky plaster doesn't carry that risk. It is the loss-averse choice. It is also the choice that perpetuates the problem.
Social complexity — the politics of the hard fix
Chris Argyris's research on organisational learning (1991) identified what he called 'defensive routines' — the patterns of behaviour that organisations collectively adopt to avoid the anxiety and threat associated with examining and changing their fundamental assumptions. These routines are not failures of individual courage; they are systemic responses to the social complexity of organisations, where telling the full truth about a problem implicates people, processes and decisions that carry political weight.
Argyris, C. (1991) 'Teaching Smart People How to Learn', Harvard Business Review, May–June 1991.
The sticky plaster is rarely chosen out of ignorance. It is chosen because the alternative — the hard fix — requires someone to say something that is true but uncomfortable, and then to bear the consequences of having said it. — Stephen Dixon-Mould FCIPD
The structural problem that is causing the performance issue often has an author. It reflects a decision that was made, a design that was chosen, a behaviour that has been tolerated. Naming it clearly and fixing it properly requires someone to surface that history — and in most organisations, that is a politically costly act.
The compounding cost of deferred fixes
Each sticky plaster has a direct cost — the time and resources spent on an intervention that will not resolve the underlying problem. But the more significant cost is indirect, and it compounds over time.
Beer and Nohria's research on change failure (Harvard Business Review, 2000) identified that organisations which repeatedly attempt and fail to address a problem become progressively less capable of addressing it. Each failed intervention reduces the confidence of the organisation that change is possible, increases the scepticism of the people who will need to implement it, and raises the political cost of the next attempt. The problem becomes not just structural but cultural — a shared belief that this is simply how things are here.
Beer, M. and Nohria, N. (2000) 'Cracking the Code of Change', Harvard Business Review, May–June 2000.
First application
The sticky plaster relieves immediate pressure. Small cost, temporary relief. Problem deferred, not resolved. Some scepticism about whether it will hold.
Second application
The same problem has resurfaced. A different solution is tried. Scepticism increases. The organisation begins to normalise the problem as a recurring feature.
Third application and beyond
The problem is now cultural as well as structural. "We've tried to fix this before" is the assumption. The hard fix becomes harder because the belief that it's possible has eroded.
What makes the hard fix possible
The good news is that the psychological and political barriers to the hard fix are not fixed. They respond to specific conditions — conditions that leaders can deliberately create. Three matter most.
Condition 1 — Name the pattern, not the person
The hardest part of the hard fix is usually the conversation about why the problem exists. That conversation becomes impossible if it is experienced as an attack on the person who made the original decision or designed the original structure. The most effective leaders learn to separate the pattern from the person — to describe what the system is producing without assigning personal blame for its design. This is a learnable skill, not a personality trait.
Condition 2 — Make the cost of inaction visible
Present bias is most powerful when the cost of inaction is abstract or distant. The antidote is specificity — making the commercial consequence of continued sticky plaster application concrete, quantified and proximate. "This structural issue is costing us approximately £X in management time, attrition and productivity impact each quarter" is a different conversation to "this is a persistent problem we need to address." The first makes the case for the discomfort of the fix. The second doesn't.
Condition 3 — C-Suite must model the willingness to be examined
The deepest application of the sticky plaster principle is at C-Suite level — when the hard fix implicates the behaviour, decisions or style of the senior team itself. This is where organisational defensive routines are most firmly entrenched, and where the leader's willingness to subject themselves to the same scrutiny they are asking of others becomes the critical variable. Kotter's research on change leadership (1995) consistently identified senior team behaviour as the primary predictor of whether hard changes are achieved or avoided.
Kotter, J.P. (1995) 'Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail', Harvard Business Review, March–April 1995.
A diagnostic question for any leadership team
The most useful diagnostic question I have found — one that surfaces sticky plaster patterns quickly and honestly — is this: "What problem have we tried to fix more than twice?"
In most leadership teams, the answers come quickly. The recurring performance issue in a particular function. The friction between two parts of the organisation that has existed for years. The cultural behaviour that everyone acknowledges and no one has fully resolved. The structural ambiguity that produces recurring conflict about accountabilities.
These are the sticky plaster problems. They are usually not complex in their diagnosis — most leadership teams can describe them accurately. What has been missing is not understanding but willingness: the willingness to bear the short-term disruption, political cost and uncertainty of the hard fix.
The question is never whether the hard fix is necessary. It always is — eventually. The question is whether you choose to do it on your terms, before the crisis forces it, or whether you wait until you have no choice. — Stephen Dixon-Mould FCIPD
What Hello People does differently
The most common reason organisations call Hello People is not that they don't know what the hard fix is. It is that they have been unable to create the internal conditions to pursue it. The political weight, the defensive routines, the present bias of the immediate pressure — all of these are real, and they are not solved by another internal working group or another external strategy document.
What changes is the introduction of someone who is not subject to the same political constraints — who can name the pattern without bearing the same personal cost, who can make the commercial case for the hard fix without the same loss aversion, and who will still be there when the disruption of change creates pressure to return to the sticking plaster.
The courage to fix what others couldn't is not a personal quality. It is a function of the conditions you create — and the people you have alongside you when you create them.
If you recognise the sticky plaster pattern in your organisation, start a conversation with Stephen. The first conversation is diagnostic, not commercial.
References: Kahneman, D. (2011) 'Thinking, Fast and Slow', Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A. (1979) 'Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk', Econometrica, 47(2); Argyris, C. (1991) 'Teaching Smart People How to Learn', Harvard Business Review; Beer, M. and Nohria, N. (2000) 'Cracking the Code of Change', Harvard Business Review; Kotter, J.P. (1995) 'Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail', Harvard Business Review. Academic grounding informed by current MSc in Organisational & Business Psychology, University of Wolverhampton.
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