Why does the same team problem keep coming back?

27/08/2026

Why does the same team problem keep coming back? 

Here we are again

Perhaps you know the feeling already.

Something in your team has been niggling for a while, so eventually you decide to deal with it properly.

Maybe you sit everyone down and have the long-overdue conversation, or maybe you clarify who owns what, change the way meetings work, tighten up a process or agree to some new ways of working together.

Perhaps you take the team out of the usual environment altogether and give them some proper time and space to reset.

And, for a while, it works.

Things feel clearer, the atmosphere a little lighter and people even seem more willing to say what they mean. There’s a renewed sense of who is responsible for what and the feeling that everyone has understood what needs to change is, frankly, invigorating!

You might even have one of those rare moments where you think: finally, we’ve cracked it.

Then a few weeks pass by.

One of those decisions that should have been made in the team lands back on your desk. Someone mentions, privately, a frustration you thought had already been dealt with, or an action everyone agreed mattered has actually gone nowhere. Two people who seemed to have cleared the air are starting to work around one another again.

Massive sigh.

Nothing dramatic needs to have happened and the likelihood is that you can’t for the life of you recall a specific moment when things reverted. You’ve just got that slightly deflating realisation that, somehow, you are back in familiar territory. Think lilo with a slow puncture.

What makes this already frustrating experience even worse is when you’re working with people you consider to be very capable. These aren’t people who need to be told the basics of working in a team. They know what was agreed, they understand what good collaboration, ownership or communication is supposed to look like. You have already put time, effort and probably a fair amount of emotional energy into changing things.

So the natural response is to try again. You can’t be that far away, surely?

The fact that the problem keeps returning is actually really useful information. If a team can understand what needs to change, genuinely intend to change it and still find itself slipping back into the same pattern, it is worth getting curious about why that is.

Perhaps whatever you have been fixing is only part of the story.

 

 

When a problem keeps coming back, pay attention

There is something that feels unfair about a recurring team problem. When it comes back, our first instinct is often to assume that somebody hasn’t tried hard enough.

Maybe people didn’t take the conversation seriously, or perhaps they slipped back into old habits. Maybe the new process wasn’t followed properly, or somebody simply failed to do what they said they were going to do.

And, of course, sometimes that is totally what has happened.

Yet when the same pattern keeps finding its way back into the team, particularly after people have genuinely tried to change it, it’s worth resisting the urge to immediately blame effort, attitude or commitment, however hard that may be.

Why?

Because recurrence gives you information.

If everyone left the conversation understanding what needed to happen, meant what they said and still ended up back in roughly the same place, something interesting is going on.

It’s probably not that the team has forgotten communication matters, that your senior people have suddenly lost their understanding of accountability, or that somebody woke up one morning and decided collaboration was wildly overrated after all.

More often, people are responding to the reality of working together as it actually exists.

That reality is incredibly powerful.

Day-to-day work has a persistent habit of taking over: deadlines arrive, pressure increases, familiar personalities interact in familiar ways and suddenly the shiny new intention is competing with years of experience about how things really work around here.

This is why a team can have an excellent conversation and still not create lasting change.

It is also why somebody can leave an away day absolutely committed to behaving differently, then find themselves doing exactly the same thing three weeks later. Despite the intent being completely genuine, something still pulls the team back.

That is the bit worth noticing.

Once a problem has returned two, three, perhaps even five times, the question needs to change.

Rather than asking why people haven’t managed to fix it properly yet, it becomes much more interesting to ask why this particular pattern has such staying power.

What is it about the way this team works that keeps bringing everyone back here?

You don’t need to know the answer yet.

For now, simply noticing that the recurrence itself is telling you something is a much more useful place to start than gearing up to have exactly the same conversation for the sixth time.

This is progress!

 

 

Why we keep fixing the thing we can see

There is a very understandable reason we keep trying to fix the visible problem: it gives us something to get hold of.

• If people aren’t communicating well, you can improve communication.
• If decisions are taking too long, you can clarify who gets to make them.
• If actions keep disappearing into the ether, you can introduce more accountability.
• If meetings aren’t working, you can change the agenda, the format or who needs to be in the room.

All perfectly sensible and, let’s face it, it feels good to be doing something.

There is a problem, you have identified it, everyone can broadly agree what it is and now there is an action plan. Lovely. We humans do enjoy a bit of order.

The difficulty comes when the name we have given the problem starts to become the explanation for it.

Take communication as the prime example.

“We need to communicate better” is probably the thing we hear more often than any other when people talk to us about their teams. And sometimes it is absolutely right. Information may genuinely not be getting where it needs to go, expectations might be unclear, or people may simply need better ways of keeping one another informed.

Equally, calling something a communication problem doesn’t tell you why the communication is poor in the first place.

The same goes for accountability, collaboration, alignment, ownership and all the other perfectly respectable words that find their way onto team-development wish lists.

They describe what we can see.

• Someone isn’t speaking up.
• A decision keeps being escalated.
• Two functions aren’t working well together.
• People agree actions and then don’t follow through.
• The team appears aligned in the meeting and behaves rather differently once everyone leaves it.

Those things are real, they do matter and they probably do need to change. They just might not tell you very much about why they are happening.

And this is where it gets interesting, because the visible problem is usually the easiest part to agree on. It is far harder to make sense of why a group of intelligent, capable people who genuinely want things to work well keep finding themselves repeating something none of them would consciously choose.

That can feel frustratingly untidy.

There may not be an obvious process to fix, a single person to speak to or a neat action to add to somebody’s list. Different people may even have completely different ideas about what is going on, which is precisely why the visible thing is so tempting.

It gives everybody somewhere safe and practical to start.

The danger is that, if you keep treating the label as the cause, you can become incredibly good at solving the same problem over and over again.

Then, slowly, the familiar pattern reappears and you find yourself wondering why something that made complete sense at the time hasn’t stuck.

At that point, rather than concluding “the fix didn’t work!”, there is something more useful to consider.

Perhaps the thing you could see was never the whole explanation for what was happening in the first place.

 

The same problem can mean very different things

This is where team problems start to get properly interesting.

Two teams can look as though they have exactly the same issue and, underneath the surface, be dealing with something completely different.

Take a team where people rarely challenge one another in meetings.

From the outside, it might look like a confidence problem, a meeting problem or simply a group of people who are just too polite.

Perhaps that is exactly what it is.

Or maybe experience has taught them something rather different:

• that challenging a particular person comes with consequences they would rather avoid.
• disagreement tends to get revisited later, outside the room.
• the leader says they want challenge and then unconsciously closes it down when it arrives.
• there is history between two people that everyone else has become remarkably skilled at navigating around.

From the outside, the symptom looks the same: people aren’t speaking up.

What is creating it could be very different.

The same is true when everything keeps travelling upwards.

You might reasonably conclude that people need to take more ownership, and perhaps they do.

Equally, if decisions have historically been questioned, reversed or quietly taken back by somebody more senior, the team may have become very good at doing exactly what experience has taught them to do — wait.

And when two functions aren’t collaborating particularly well, the obvious answer might be clearer processes, shared priorities or more opportunities to work together.

Again, possibly.

Or perhaps it’s one of these:

• the two people leading those functions don’t really trust one another.
• their teams are picking up on a tension nobody has formally acknowledged.
• both sides have perfectly sensible reasons for protecting their own patch, even while everyone agrees that better collaboration would be good for the organisation.

This is what makes the language we use around team problems so important.

Communication. Accountability. Collaboration. Alignment. Ownership.

They are useful descriptions of what is happening, yet they are not always explanations for why it is happening.

And once you realise that, you can start to see why two teams asking for “better communication” might need entirely different things.

One may genuinely need clearer ways of sharing information, while the other may already have more than enough ways to communicate and still have something important that nobody feels able to say.

From a distance, those teams can look remarkably similar.

Up close, they are anything but.

That is why the question “What problem are we trying to fix?” can only take you so far.

Sometimes the much more revealing question is simply:

What might be making this problem happen here?

So, rather than hurtling straight towards an answer, try to resist assuming that the first explanation is the whole one.

 

 

So, what keeps creating it?

By this point, hopeful the more useful question has presented itself to you.

Instead of How do we fix this again?

It becomes What keeps creating it?

It sounds like a small shift, yet it changes where you look.

• Why does this particular decision always find its way back to the same person?
• Why does everyone agree that something needs to change, then quietly revert as soon as the pressure goes up?
• Why does the conversation feel noticeably different when one particular person is in the room?
• Why can two parts of the same team describe their working relationship in completely different ways?
• Why do people keep asking for more clarity when, on paper at least, things already look pretty clear?

None of those questions gives you an instant answer, and that is rather the point.

When a pattern keeps returning, something is helping it survive.

It might sit somewhere you haven’t looked yet, it might be more complicated than the label you have given the problem. It might even involve people, relationships or behaviours you hadn’t previously considered part of the issue at all.

You don’t need to diagnose all of that from an article. In fact, trying to leap straight to another answer is probably how you ended up here in the first place.

For now, the useful shift is simply this:

Stop asking only “How do we make this problem go away?” and start wondering “What keeps bringing it back?”

They are two very different questions and they can lead you to very different answers.

 

 

What if the problem you can see isn’t the problem you need to fix?

This is exactly what we’ll be exploring in our free webinar on 14th October 2026.

If you lead, support or are responsible for an important team that keeps getting stuck in familiar patterns – communication issues, weak ownership, siloes, recurring tensions, decisions that keep travelling upwards or conversations that never quite seem to happen where they need to – this session is designed for you.

We’ll look at why capable teams can keep returning to problems they already understand, why apparently sensible fixes sometimes create only temporary change, and what becomes possible when you start looking beyond the obvious issue.

If you’ve already had the conversation, changed the process, reset the expectations and somehow ended up back in the same place, doing more of the same is unlikely to be the most interesting next move.

It might be time to look somewhere else.

 

Join Anna Jester on 14th October for:

What’s Really Holding Your Team Back

Register for the free webinar

 

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