What was this organisation designed for?

There is a sentence, usually associated with Paul Batalden: “every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets”

We return to it often at HAANA Business School for Human Flourishing, because it removes a comfortable illusion. When an organisation reports rising burnout, falling trust, or talented people leaving within eighteen months, the first reflex is to look for the individuals involved.

Who is struggling. Who needs resilience training. Who was the wrong hire.

Peter Senge spent much of The Fifth Discipline showing why that reflex misleads us. Structure shapes behaviour. Put different people into the same structure and, over time, they tend to produce remarkably similar results. The pressure people feel, the shortcuts they take, the silences they keep in meetings, are in large part the predictable output of how work has been arranged around them.

Seen this way, exhaustion carries information. It tells us something about workload design, about how decisions travel, about which kinds of effort are rewarded and which remain invisible. An organisation that treats exhaustion as a private weakness loses access to that information, and usually responds by adding something: an app, a workshop, a wellbeing week. The design that produced the exhaustion stays in place, and the results return.

Personal responsibility still matters. The weightiest share of it, however, sits with those who shape the conditions in which everyone else works. That is where HAANA begins. We exist to change organisations, and we work with the people who hold the pen on the design: executives, managers, founders, boards, and the teams who live inside what gets drawn.

The first question we ask is simple and uncomfortable. If this organisation is producing exactly what it was designed to produce, what, precisely, was it designed for?

Wellbeing is not something we add to systems. It is something we design systems for.


– The HAANA founding team: Alejandro Villazon Pineda, Jürgen Mohr, Liane Grassi, Maria Marshall-Clarke –