“Why can’t they just…?”
“Why can’t they just follow the standard work we agreed on three months ago?”
“Why can’t leadership just pick one priority and stick with it for more than a day?”
“Why can’t these people just attend my Lean training, so they can understand how great this stuff is??”
I think some version of that sentence runs through my head, in one flavor or another, about a dozen times a week. Sound familiar?
It turns out I’ve been starting that sentence wrong the whole time.
This hit hard for me last week, sitting in a circle of people at Kata Together (the annual, weeklong immersive learning experience hosted by Kata School Cascadia) who have collectively spent centuries thinking hard about how change actually happens. Someone said the phrase out loud, almost as a joke, and the whole room laughed the particular laugh of people recognizing themselves, with a touch of guilt.
The Blame Built Into the Question
“Why can’t they just—?” sounds like a question. It isn’t. It’s a verdict, dressed up in a question mark.
It assumes you’ve already done everything right. It assumes the obstacle is entirely theirs. And it closes the door on the one thing your job actually requires: curiosity about what’s happening on the other side of the table.
That’s the whole premise of change management, once you strip away the frameworks and the templates. Not inspirational speeches. Not the perfect business case. Not forcing compliance. Curiosity, applied consistently, to real people, under real constraints, is the only way to actually understand what's holding someone back before you try to influence it. “Why can’t they just—?” skips all of that and goes straight to sentencing.
Technical vs. Adaptive Problems
Ronald Heifetz, who built much of what we know about adaptive leadership, draws a line between two different kinds of problems.[1]
Technical problems have a known fix. An expert hands you the steps, you follow them, done.
Adaptive challenges don’t work that way. They require the people living the problem to change something about how they think, what they value, or what they’re willing to give up. Nobody can do that work for them, no matter how good the rationale or instructions are.
My mentor Mark Rosenthal has written about exactly this split showing up in 5S, since that’s a common starting point for organizations interested in Lean. The concept – which we’ll summarize as “a place for everything, everything in its place” – is quite simple. You can teach it in a few hours, and most people don’t object to starting in on the first S, where you “sort” through and get rid of things you don’t need. But as you start putting things back in different places, objections surface, usually rooted in some quiet, underlying fear nobody’s named yet. “As you introduce technical changes,” he writes, “you are likely to surface adaptive kinds of obstacles. If you want real change, you have to address those with something other than just doubling down on enforcing the rules.”
5S is not about a one-time effort to clean up the shop (or desk, or computer – wherever the work gets done). It actually calls on you to rearrange your workplace and show up day after day with the discipline to keep everything in order over the long run. The purpose for this is to make us humans more likely to notice deviations, as these visuals are often an indicator of underlying deviation in process. Well yikes, that’s kind of scary – so now everyone will know that if there’s a paper on my desk, I didn’t finish my work for the day?
The day you create the shadowboard is full of excitement, and it’s not hard to get people to participate. But for those “standardize” and “sustain” steps (the 4th and 5th S), everyone has to decide for themselves that this is who they are now: The kind of people who maintain an orderly workplace every day. No audit checklist gets you there.
“Why can’t they just—?” is what it sounds like when you hand someone a technical fix for an adaptive problem. It’s not that they’re resisting you. You don’t need to convince them harder. They’re standing in the middle of adaptive work, deciding for themselves whether this is worth what it costs, and that decision can’t be rushed, delegated, forced, or checklisted away.
None of that shows up as open refusal. It shows up as silence, or slow-walking, or a version of “I’ll get to it” that never quite arrives.
Try This Question Instead
Here’s the smallest, cheapest intervention I know. Swap “why can’t they just—?” for “I wonder what’s going on for them?”
Same situation. Same frustration, even, in the moment you catch yourself thinking it. But one sentence ends in blame, and the other opens a door, the kind that actually wants an answer. You would never ask “why can’t you just—?” to a person’s face – which is one clue that it’s not a question that embodies respect for people. But it’s actually quite easy and interesting to ask “what’s going on for you?” or some similar form. And you are far more likely to learn something useful in the answer.
This is, not coincidentally, the entire premise behind the kind of coaching we do at Growing Wild: ask, don’t tell. Get curious about the obstacle actually in front of the person, not the one you assumed you’d find there.
What Curiosity Actually Sounds Like
The next step isn’t to push harder for the thing you’ve already asked for. It’s to deeply understand their needs and obstacles instead.
Instead of fuming behind the scenes, “why did they stop doing the daily cleaning procedure?”, perhaps ask them directly, with genuine curiosity: “What gets in the way of carrying out the standard every day?” or “what makes it hard to keep up this habit?” A real question, about what actually happened, asked like you mean it, not like you’re the inquisition force.
This approach can apply to just about any change effort that has hit a wall. A real, open, put-your-agenda-down conversation about what’s actually on their mind. What’s hard right now. What they’re worried about, that might have nothing to do with your project at all.
Ask a supervisor what’s hard right now, with no other agenda, and you might hear about a short-staffed shift, a kid home sick, a nagging worry that the new process will make them look slow in front of people they used to train. None of that shows up in the official status reports, even if you’re using the best visual management. All of it is exactly what’s standing between your desire and their taking action.
You’re not looking for resistance, because there usually isn’t any, not really. You’re listening for where they actually are in the adaptive work: what they haven’t decided yet, what they’re still weighing, what it would cost them to fully commit.
Ask. Then stop talking. Let the silence sit a beat longer than feels comfortable. That’s usually where the real answer shows up.
I still catch myself thinking some version of “why can't they just do [insert Lean tool here] already?” But now, I try to get curious instead. What's actually competing for their attention this week? What would they need to believe about this training, tool, or step before it earns a spot on a calendar that's already full? I don't always get an answer. But I get a lot further than I did when the sentence started with inadvertent blame.
The question worth sitting with:
What’s the “why can’t they just—” running through your head this week? And what might you learn if you asked “I wonder what’s going on for them” instead?
[1] Heifetz, Ronald A., et al. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World. Harvard Business Press, 2009.