Hi there,
For a long time, I’ve been a student of the many ways humans make sense of life—psychology, spirituality, neuroscience, and beyond.
Among the most fascinating to me are the ancient medical systems of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda.
In those systems, there’s a core principle that feels increasingly relevant to how I see companies: When something is imbalanced in a living system, you can see it everywhere.
Take the liver, for instance: In TCM, they see that if there’s a liver imbalance, it doesn’t just hide quietly in the background.
It shows up in the color and shape of the tongue. In the texture of the fingernails. In the line next to the nose. In the pulse. In the eyes.
Every part reflects the whole.
How to Find Your Team’s Dysfunction
The same is true in a company. Nothing is isolated.
Just like the liver manifests in multiple signals throughout the body, dysfunction in a company will show up everywhere.
If there’s an issue with communication, you won’t just see it in one meeting.
You’ll see it in missed deadlines, vague emails, inefficient handoffs, and emotionally charged decisions.
If there’s a decision-making problem, you won’t just find it at the top. You’ll see it in a product team hesitating to ship, in marketing not knowing what they’re aiming for, in finance holding onto funds too long or releasing them too soon.
And if you, as a leader, are having the same challenge show up more than once—say, people being late, or avoiding feedback—you can be almost certain it’s systemic.
It may be a reflection of your own consciousness, or it may be a reflection of the culture. Most likely, it’s both.
What this means: Leadership stops being about fixing individual problems. It becomes about pattern recognition.
Instead of: “How do I get Bob to show up on time?”
You ask: “What is happening in this system that makes everyone show up late?” or “What is our culture’s relationship to accountability, time, and commitment?”
You become less of a manager and more of a diagnostician.
And when you approach leadership this way, a kind of x-ray vision emerges.
You can walk into a meeting and know what the Slack messages look like.
You can watch one person hedge their statements and know the team is afraid of offending.
You can see one conflict avoided and sense that the whole organization is tiptoeing around truth.
Experiment
This week, observe your organization like a traditional medicine practitioner.
Look at your company as a living system. Choose one signal (lateness, low energy, vague communication, whatever it may be) and ask:
Where else does this show up?
What does this reflect about our culture?
What would need to shift systemically for this to change?
Then ask yourself: What’s the system-level shift that would make this problem obsolete?
Big Love,
Joe
How to diagnose your team's dysfunction?
Easy.
Self-awareness, trauma-informed, and emotional intelligence.
Who's noticing the dysfunction?
Everything is a mirror.
/Claus