What it is
A quick fix solves the immediate problem. The pressure drops. Everyone moves on. But underneath, something is shifting. The fix has side effects that won’t show up for weeks, months, sometimes years - and when they do, the original problem comes back worse than before.
This is one of the most common patterns in organisational life. It shows up whenever the pressure to act quickly overwhelms the patience to understand what’s really going on.
What this looks like in organisations
A team is missing deadlines, so you add more people. The coordination overhead increases, communication gets harder, and within six months the team is missing deadlines again - but now with a bigger headcount and a bigger budget.
A customer service team is overwhelmed, so you introduce scripts and standardised responses. Complaints drop initially. Then customers start escalating because they feel unheard. The scripts that fixed the volume problem created a quality problem.
A leadership team notices low engagement scores, so they launch an engagement initiative - town halls, surveys, a values refresh. Scores tick up briefly. But the structural issues (unclear roles, too many priorities, no decision-making authority) haven’t changed. Scores drift back down, and now people are cynical about engagement initiatives too.
How to use this
When you find yourself reaching for a quick solution, pause and ask two questions:
What side effects might this create? Not “could this go wrong?” - that’s too vague. Specifically: what will this fix change, beyond the thing I’m trying to fix? Who else will be affected? What will they do differently as a result?
What happens when the fix wears off? If the fix is addressing a symptom rather than a cause, the symptom will return. Will we be in a better or worse position to deal with it then?
The point isn’t that quick fixes are always wrong. Sometimes you need to stop the bleeding before you can treat the wound. The danger is when the quick fix becomes the only fix - when the organisation never gets around to addressing the root cause because the symptom keeps getting managed.
The thought to hold onto
The most dangerous fixes are the ones that work - just long enough for everyone to stop looking for the real solution.
When you’re seeing this
You’re seeing this when the same problem keeps coming back despite repeated interventions. When each round of fixing seems to make the next round harder. When people say “we tried that, it didn’t work” about something that did work briefly. When the organisation has developed a pattern of lurching from crisis to intervention to temporary relief to crisis.