THE IDEA
The same mistakes, different costumes
Certain failure patterns show up so reliably, across such different systems, that they’ve earned names. A team that keeps lowering its targets instead of raising its performance. A market where every competitor matches every price cut until nobody makes money. A community that overuses a shared resource until it collapses. These aren’t random misfortunes. They’re system traps - structural patterns that pull people into bad outcomes even when everyone involved is acting sensibly.
What makes them traps is that the structure creates the behaviour. It’s not about bad people making bad decisions. It’s about a system whose feedback loops, delays, and incentives reliably produce the same disappointing result. The individuals change, the names change, the context changes - but the pattern persists because the structure persists.
The good news is that because these traps are structural, they’re recognisable. Once you’ve seen the pattern, you can spot it in a new context before it fully plays out. And because each trap has a characteristic structure, each one also has a characteristic escape route - a way of redesigning the system so the trap stops working.
IN PRACTICE
Familiar patterns, new settings
A fitness routine starts strong. After three weeks, a busy day means skipping a session. The next week, “good enough” becomes three sessions instead of five. Then two. Then one. Then none. Nobody decided to stop exercising. The goal eroded one small concession at a time. This is the eroding goals trap, and it works identically in organisations that slowly accept longer response times, lower quality, or smaller ambitions.
Two coffee shops open on the same street. One drops prices. The other matches. The first drops again. Within a year, both are selling coffee below cost and wondering how they got here. Neither wanted a price war. But the structure - two competitors responding to each other’s moves without a mechanism to stop - made escalation inevitable. The same pattern drives arms races, social media outrage cycles, and custody battles.
A shared office kitchen starts clean. Everyone assumes someone else will load the dishwasher. The sink fills up. People start eating at their desks. The kitchen becomes unusable. Nobody chose this outcome, but the absence of clear responsibility for a shared resource made it predictable. Scale this up and you’re looking at overfished oceans, depleted aquifers, and congested roads.
WORKING WITH THIS
Naming the trap to escape it
The first move is diagnosis. When you’re stuck in a frustrating pattern, ask: does this match a known trap? Is this eroding goals? Escalation? Tragedy of the commons? Shifting the burden? Naming the pattern is powerful because it shifts the conversation from “whose fault is this?” to “what structure is producing this?”
Each trap has its own escape route. For eroding goals, the fix is to anchor your standard to something external - a benchmark, a commitment, a vision that doesn’t flex with your frustration. For escalation, someone has to break the cycle unilaterally or both parties need a mutual agreement to stop. For the tragedy of the commons, the resource needs a feedback mechanism that connects individual use to collective impact - either through shared rules, visible consequences, or redesigned ownership.
The deeper skill is learning to spot traps before they fully spring. When someone says “let’s just lower the target this quarter and revisit next year,” that’s the eroding goals trap forming. When two departments start matching each other’s headcount requests, that’s escalation. The patterns announce themselves early if you know what to listen for.
THE INSIGHT
The line to remember
A system trap isn’t bad luck - it’s a structure working exactly as designed. Change the structure and you change the outcome.
RECOGNITION
When this is in play
You’re looking at a system trap when the same frustrating pattern keeps recurring despite different people and different attempts to fix it. When everyone involved is behaving reasonably but the collective outcome is unreasonable. When the conversation keeps returning to “who’s to blame?” instead of “what’s creating this?” When a problem feels inevitable or natural - that sense of inevitability is often the trap’s signature, making structural failure feel like the way things just are.