Wiring the Winning Organization: The Leader’s Journey
July 31, 2026 – Steve Spear
We are all familiar with the paradox.
Organizations compete in the same markets. They draw from the same foundational science and technology. They operate under many of the same rules and regulations. They hire from overlapping pools of talent and rely on many of the same suppliers and professional disciplines.
For most, the outcomes are also broadly similar.
Then there are the outliers: organizations able to generate and deliver far greater value, with greater speed, reliability, adaptability, and resilience—and often with less wasted effort and less stress.
Toyota has long illustrated this paradox. Its advantage first became widely visible in manufacturing productivity and quality, but it did not remain confined there. Toyota’s performance advantages also became visible in product development, new market categories, luxury vehicles, and hybrid technologies produced at enormous scale.
Much was the same as for its competitors—except for the outcomes.
Where does such a difference come from?
A central premise of Wiring the Winning Organization is that we organize to solve hard problems. Problems become organizational because they are too large, too complex, or too dependent on different forms of expertise for any one person to solve alone.
Success, therefore, depends on two things.
The first is structure—whether the organization makes collaboration in problem solving and coordination in action quick, easy, and effective.
The second is dynamics—whether people see and solve problems early and often, generate useful solutions, and put those solutions rapidly into practice.
The leader’s journey begins when a senior leader recognizes an unacceptable gap between what the organization is accomplishing and what it should be capable of accomplishing.
The next step is more difficult: the leader must recognize that the gap is operational, not merely administrative.
Organizations frequently respond to disappointing performance with new metrics, tighter schedules, additional reporting, tougher accountability, and more forceful direction. These measures may describe the problem or intensify pressure. They rarely repair the conditions producing it.
An operational gap requires an operational diagnosis.
That diagnosis cannot be made entirely from a conference room.
The leader must leave the familiar world of reports, reviews, and executive meetings and go to the point where value is actually being created—or where attempts to create it are being frustrated.
This is the leader’s departure.
Joseph Campbell described the hero’s journey as departure, initiation, and return—leaving the familiar world, undergoing a transformative experience, and returning with a changed understanding. The leader’s journey follows a similar pattern.
But going to the point of work is not enough. What matters is how the leader goes.
The leader does not go to apply command and control at close range. Nor does the leader go primarily to identify what the people doing the work are doing wrong.
The leader goes to observe, inquire, and listen.
That distinction is critical. Too many improvement efforts involve outsiders making cursory observations and then criticizing the people at the point of work for being undisciplined, disorganized, or inefficient.
The leader’s journey reverses the direction of the critique.
When people lack the necessary information, materials, equipment, approvals, training, or cross-functional support to succeed, the conditions at the point of work reflect the system leaders have created and maintained.
The point of work is not merely where leaders inspect employees.
It is where the consequences of the system inspect the leaders.
That is the transformative moment.
The leader begins to see local frustrations, interruptions, and failures not as isolated deficiencies but as symptoms of broken organizational connections. One group has not understood what another requires. Expertise is separated from the place where it is needed. Information arrives late or distorted. Responsibility has been assigned without corresponding authority or resources.
The organization is “miswired.”
The leader’s role must therefore change—from administrator of the existing system to architect of a better one.
This does not mean that the leader personally solves every problem. No leader has the time, knowledge, or cognitive capacity to do that.
Instead, the leader uses authority to bring to the point of work those responsible for supporting functions—both those with the necessary technical competence and those with decisional authority.
Together, they can see how their decisions, delays, procedures, and assumptions affect those trying to create value. They can see where collaboration has broken down, where coordination has failed, and where the people doing the work have been left without what they need to succeed.
They can then repair the cross-functional circuitry required for successful action.
At DTE Energy, for example, leaders went into the field with service technicians and saw the many impediments that made routine work unnecessarily difficult. The problems did not primarily reflect a lack of effort by the technicians—they reflected failures in the larger system supporting them.
Healthcare leaders have had similar experiences. When medical directors and unit managers observe care directly, they often find doctors, nurses, pharmacists, technicians, and other staff scavenging for medications, information, equipment, approvals, or assistance. Their attention is pulled away from patients because the organization has failed to provide what they need, where and when they need it.
Once leaders see those conditions as their responsibility, they can begin to repair them.
But the journey cannot end with the personal enlightenment of one senior leader.
The leader must focus the problem-seeking and problem-solving intelligence already active throughout the organization on a common purpose.
The intelligence does not need to be created, nor is there a finite quantity that must be distributed thinly across the enterprise. It already exists throughout the organization—in the experience, observation, expertise, and curiosity of the people doing and supporting the work.
The challenge is whether the organizational system focuses that intelligence or disperses it.
Poorly designed systems direct attention up and out, away from the point of work and away from the common purpose. Questions are escalated through layers. Information is abstracted and delayed. Decisions are separated from the people who best understand the situation. Distinct functions optimize their own activities rather than converging on the outcome the organization exists to produce.
Well-designed systems direct intelligence down and in, toward the point of work and toward a shared purpose.
They create critical mass without requiring centralization.
Many people, functions, and forms of expertise can remain distinct while being focused on the same problem, much as multiple mirrors can be aligned on a common focal point to produce an image or an intensity that no single mirror could create alone.
This requires modeling behaviors for others and coaching them to improve their rigor, discipline, curiosity, and effectiveness. Leaders at every level must learn to recognize operating problems, trace them to failures in organizational design, convene the necessary expertise and authority, and repair the connections that prevent people from succeeding.
Just as organizations develop capabilities in engineering, logistics, finance, technology, human resources, and operations, organizational system design must become a developed capability.
The leader is not the hero because the leader personally solves the organization’s problems.
The leader’s transformation matters because it allows the intelligence of everyone else to be brought to bear.
When that happens, people across the entire organization can see problems as they emerge. They can quickly form coherent, cross-functional teams with the necessary competence, resources, responsibility, and authority. They can solve problems near the point where information is richest and share what they learn so the whole organization improves.
The organization stops being a place where small disturbances accumulate invisibly until they become large failures.
It becomes a place where local stability, local problem solving, and local learning repeatedly combine into extraordinary system performance.
The leader returns from the journey as a changed person—and begins creating the conditions for everyone else to make the journey as well.