For generations, London (England) was famous for its fog, although what people called fog was often a mixture of natural moisture and smoke from the coal-burned homes, factories and power stations across the city.
People knew the air could be unpleasant, visibility could become poor and breathing could become difficult, but these conditions had existed for so long that London gradually learned to live with them. People adjusted their routines, transportation adapted, businesses carried on, and coal continued to provide the heat and energy a growing city depended upon.
Nobody woke up one morning and decided to create a pollution problem. No single person was behaving irrationally, and no single decision created the situation. Millions of reasonable decisions, made independently over many years, accumulated into a condition nobody would have intentionally designed.
This is where the story becomes interesting from the perspective of critical thinking, because familiarity has a funny way of changing how we see things.
When something has been around long enough, we can stop seeing it as a problem and begin seeing it simply as part of the landscape. We get good at working around it, different parts of the system deal with whatever lands in front of them, and today's urgent problem naturally gets more attention than understanding why the problem keeps coming back. Before long, workarounds become routines, explanations become accepted truths, and things that might look rather strange to someone seeing them for the first time begin to look perfectly normal to us.
Back in London, in December 1952, a combination of cold weather and still air trapped an extraordinary amount of pollution close to the ground. The resulting Great Smog became so severe that transportation was disrupted, hospitals were overwhelmed and thousands of people died during and following the event.
London had not suddenly developed a pollution problem. The Great Smog exposed the accumulated consequences of a condition the city had gradually learned to live with.
There is something very human about this story, and it reaches well beyond London and fog.
Businesses evolve in much the same way. Customers change, products and services multiply, technology is introduced, functions specialize, new leaders arrive, organizations grow, and people develop solutions to the problems immediately in front of them. Most of these decisions make perfectly good sense at the time, yet years later the system that has emerged may be very different from anything we would intentionally design if we were starting with a blank sheet of paper.
Capable people then do what capable people have always done: we adapt. We solve problems, develop workarounds, recover from disruptions and find ways to take care of customers and get the work done. There is a lot to admire in this, but there is also a risk. We can become so good at compensating for the system that we no longer notice how much effort the system is asking from us.
Sometimes our greatest strength, our ability to adapt, can make it harder to see what needs to change. In other words, the deeper lesson is that human beings can become so capable at adapting to a condition that we stop questioning the condition itself.
This is where critical thinking matters. It asks us to occasionally get our heads above the work and look at the whole environment. It asks whether problems appearing in different places might actually be connected, whether decisions that make sense locally are creating consequences somewhere else, and whether getting better at managing symptoms has distracted us from understanding their source.
Every business has a collection of core processes through which work actually gets done and value ultimately reaches the customer. Over time, these processes can become separated by functions, systems, measurements, priorities and even language. Each individual part may be working hard and doing exactly what it believes it should be doing, while the overall system becomes increasingly difficult to see.
The lesson from London is not that people failed to think. They became remarkably good at functioning within the world they had inherited, just as good people in organizations do every day. The deeper lesson is that we can become so capable at adapting to our environment that eventually we stop questioning the environment itself.
A question for all businesses is…what have we become very good at living with that we should no longer accept as normal?
What Britain did next may be the most useful part of the story.
The response eventually moved upstream. Scientists and public-health experts worked to understand what was actually creating the problem, government brought this knowledge together, and national leadership used its authority to act on what was being learned. Parliament passed the Clean Air Act of 1956, creating a coordinated approach to reducing smoke emissions, establishing smoke-control areas and encouraging the transition toward cleaner fuels.
This wasn't a neighborhood-by-neighborhood effort to help people become better at living in polluted air. It was a recognition that if the problem was systemic, the solution had to be systemic as well.
The people at the top did not need to know all the science. They needed to create the intent, bring together the people who did know the process, listen to what the system was telling them, and then have the courage to act on it.
There is an important lesson here for business leadership. Leaders do not need to personally have every answer, nor should the people closest to the work be expected to repair an entire system one local problem at a time. Leadership creates the intent and provides the authority to address problems at their source, while the people who understand the processes and the work help determine how the system should operate.
This is where connected core processes become so important. The answer is not another collection of local fixes or asking good people to become even better at recovery. The opportunity is to connect the core processes through which the business operates so people can see, understand and improve the whole system rather than continually compensating for its gaps.
Connecting the core processes also means connecting the organization around them. If we want people to see and improve the whole system, we need a common way of understanding how the business works, a common language for talking about it, and a practical way for people at every level to participate in making it better.
This means thinking about the organization as One Team, One System and One Way. One Team learns together so people understand the system beyond their own piece of it. One System practices together so knowledge becomes part of how the work is actually done, rather than something taught once and forgotten. One Way advances together so problems become visible, responsibility is clear, learning moves through the organization, and improvement happens while the work is being done.
There is another challenge hiding in all of this. The faster the world around us changes, the faster our organizations need to learn and improve. Yet the pressure created by this change often has the opposite effect. People become consumed with today's work, leaders spend more time responding to the urgent, and organizations begin to sprint simply to keep up. The faster we sprint, the less time and capacity we have to step back, learn and improve.
This is the Improvement Paradox: the faster we need to improve, the less capacity we to have to do it.
The answer cannot be to separate improvement from the work and hope we find time for it later. Later rarely comes. Learning, practice and improvement have to become part of how the work gets done every day.
The challenge is also scale. As organizations grow, it becomes harder to keep people connected, harder to create time for learning and harder to spread good practice across functions and locations. Yet this is precisely when the ability to learn, practice and improve together becomes most important.
We need to scale our ability to learn together, scale our ability to practice and participate together, and scale our ability to advance and improve together.
This requires more than training. It requires a deliberate scalable platform for connecting people to learning, giving them opportunities to practice what they are learning, making the work and the gaps visible, sharing what is being discovered, and continuously improving the way the organization works. Technology can help provide the scale, but the purpose is not technology. The purpose is to create the capacity and capability for an entire organization to learn and improve as one connected system.
London did not solve its problem by getting better at living in the fog. It went upstream, understood what was creating the fog, and changed the system that produced it.
Perhaps this is the opportunity in front of businesses today as well.