The Hidden Cost of Treating People as the Problem
- Jun 5
- 6 min read
Ben Jones is a leadership educator and senior academic leader with over 15 years’ experience across performance, education, and the creative industries. Through his “Problems Not People” approach, he helps leaders diagnose challenges in systems, behaviours, and environments rather than individuals.
Discover how a simple conversation, behavioural science, and even a dog named Blake reshaped the way leadership is understood. This article explores why separating the problem from the person can enhance curiosity, accountability, and team performance.
The problem is the problem, and the person is the person
One thing I have learned over my years as a leader is that there are certain ideas that arrive in your life and refuse to leave. Not because they are particularly complex, but because once you see them, you start noticing them everywhere.
Several years ago, I was sitting with a therapist discussing some challenges I was having with a range of people in my life. I was frustrated. I wanted people to behave differently. I wanted them to see things the way I saw them. Like most people do when they're struggling with a situation, I was focused on the individuals involved: what they were doing, what they weren't doing. The ways they were making things difficult were all I wanted to see.
After listening for a while, he said something that has stayed with me ever since, "The problem is the problem, and the person is the person."
At the time, it felt almost disappointingly simple. It wasn't some profound psychological insight or a complicated framework. Yet the more I reflected on it, the more I realized how often I was doing exactly the opposite.
Although it was the first time I had heard it, something about it felt immediately true. It was immediately clear to me that I had stopped seeing the problem and was only seeing the person. The issue and the individual had become fused together in my mind. What began as a difficult situation had gradually become a story about a difficult person.
The more I thought about it, the more I started noticing this tendency everywhere: in meetings, in organisations, in classrooms, and even in myself. Whenever something wasn't working, there seemed to be a natural pull towards identifying who was responsible: the struggling student, the resistant colleague, the underperforming manager. Sometimes those descriptions were accurate, but I started to wonder whether they were helping.
What Blake taught me about behaviour
Around the same time, my partner and I were becoming increasingly interested in behavioural science through raising our dog, Blake. Like many owners, we initially focused on the behaviour we could see. We wanted to understand why certain things were happening and, if I'm honest, how we could stop some of them.
It wasn't until we were introduced to a behavioural-science-informed approach that things started to click. These trainers rarely seemed interested in jumping straight to the behaviour itself. Instead, they spent a surprising amount of time looking at everything around it.
What happened beforehand? What conditions were present? What could be making that behaviour more likely to occur?
The more we learned, the more I found myself understanding that behaviour rarely exists in isolation. What we see is usually the visible end point of something much larger. That insight began to change the way I thought about leadership and teaching. After all, what I was really experiencing was a complex set of behaviours colliding with my own in every interaction I had.
Labels are not explanations
In education, for example, it is easy to describe a student as disengaged. We hear the word all the time. Yet when you stop and think about it, disengaged isn't really an explanation. It's a label for a set of behaviours that we conflate together to make it easier for us to describe the problem, not solve it. What serves us and the student better is to widen our lens of curiosity.
Why are they disengaged? Do they understand what is being asked of them? Do they believe they can succeed? Are there barriers outside the classroom affecting their ability to participate?
The underpinning belief of behavioural science is that all behaviour has a function. Not that all behaviour is acceptable. Not that people should avoid accountability. Simply that behaviour makes more sense when we understand what purpose it is serving.
A label might be accurate, but it doesn't help us understand the cause. I started noticing the same thing in organisations. We often talk about people being resistant to change, but resistance itself is not an explanation. It simply describes what we are observing. Separating the behaviour from the person allows leaders to recognise that many different factors may be contributing to what they are observing.
Sometimes people resist because they weren't involved in the decision-making. Sometimes they resist because previous changes have damaged trust. Sometimes they resist because the proposed change genuinely has flaws. Sometimes they resist because they are fearful of the impact the changes could have on their role.
The behaviour may look the same from the outside, but the reasons behind it can be completely different. What behavioural science gave me was a growing appreciation for context. It encouraged me to become less interested in judging behaviour and more interested in understanding it.
Accountability without understanding becomes blame
That doesn't mean abandoning accountability. In fact, I would argue the opposite. By understanding the function of behaviour and separating it from the person, leaders can move themselves and the person back towards agency, ownership, and accountability.
Over the years, I've become increasingly convinced that accountability without understanding quickly turns into blame. Once we've decided that a person is the problem, our curiosity tends to disappear. We stop asking questions because we believe we already have the answer.
But some of the most significant improvements I've seen in teams, classrooms, and organisations have come from doing the opposite: from staying curious for a little longer, from resisting the temptation to settle on the first explanation, from asking what else might be contributing to the situation.
Sometimes that investigation still leads back to the individual, and a difficult conversation is needed. Sometimes behaviour genuinely needs to change. But not always.
In my experience, we often arrive at those conclusions too quickly and sometimes miss the point entirely. We write a story about someone and carry it into every future interaction. Before long, we stop seeing new information and start looking for evidence that confirms what we already believe.
The phrase my therapist shared with me all those years ago continues to shape the way I think about leadership today. Not because it provides an answer, but because it reminds me to ask better questions.
When I'm tempted to decide that a person is the problem, I try to pause and ask what else might be happening here. What am I not seeing? What conditions are making this outcome more likely?
I don't always get it right. In truth, this is something I still catch myself doing regularly. However, I've come to believe that separating the person from the problem creates space for something that is often in short supply when challenges arise: the power of curiosity. And often, curiosity reveals things that blame never could.
The idea that became 'Problems Not People'
Looking back, this idea has changed almost every area of my professional life. It has influenced how I teach, how I lead teams, and how I approach conflict. In many ways, this idea became the foundation for 'Problems Not People', a project I created to explore leadership, behavioural science, and the human tendency to mistake symptoms for causes. Through coaching, writing, and conversation, I'm interested in helping people move from blame towards understanding and from judgement towards curiosity.
If these ideas resonate with you, I'd love to continue the conversation. You can find me at @problems.not.people, where I share regular reflections on leadership and human behaviour.
In the meantime, I'd leave you with one question, "Where in your own work or life might the problem and the person have become fused together?"
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Read more from Ben Jones
Ben Jones, Leadership Educator | Problems Not People
Ben Jones is a leadership educator and senior academic leader across performance, education, and the creative industries. He leads performance provision at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance (ICMP), working across curriculum, teams, and industry partnerships. Through his “Problems Not People” approach, Ben explores how leaders can move beyond blame to diagnose challenges in systems, behaviours, and environments. His writing focuses on clearer thinking, better conversations, and practical leadership experiments in complex environments. He is the creator of Problems Not People, where he shares ongoing reflections on leadership in practice.
