The Straight Line is a Lie: Lessons in Improving Complex Systems
“I thought I was getting better / But I’m back to where I started…”
The opening lines of The Straight Line is a Lie, the title track of The Beths’ new album, sound less like a breakup song and more like the diary of a leader trying to improve a complex system.
Anyone who has worked to change an organization knows the feeling. Progress looks promising, momentum builds, and then—suddenly—you’re right back where you began. The system snaps back to its default. Habits return. The straight line of improvement turns out to be a circle.
“The straight line was a circle / Yeah, the straight line was a lie.”
The Nature of Complex Systems
Why does this happen? Because complex systems—whether businesses, teams, or even our personal habits—are not machines that can be fixed with a wrench and a quick adjustment. They are living, adaptive, interconnected webs. Small changes ripple outward in surprising ways. Old feedback loops reinforce themselves just when you think you’ve broken them.
It’s why initiatives that start with promise so often end up back at square one. The straight line, indeed, is a lie.
The Loneliness of Change
Systems resist because their primary instinct is survival. Any attempt to make fundamental changes threatens that stability. Jamshid Gharajedaghi, in Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity, captures the cost of this work with piercing honesty:
“Absent the support of a courageous, charismatic leader who enjoys the confidence of his/her people, any suggestions for a fundamental change become potentially self-destructive propositions. The fool who chooses to take on this role should be aware of his/her eventual loneliness.”
That loneliness is something I’ve seen up close in my work with CEOs, executive directors, and senior leaders. For many, the greatest challenge is not just the resistance of the system, but the absence of a safe place to process what they’re experiencing.
They can’t fully process with their leadership team without raising doubts.
They can’t bring everything to the board without creating concerns.
And they often can’t share it all with a spouse without carrying the stress home.
The result is that the very people tasked with leading change are often left most alone.
This is why many leaders benefit from working with an executive coach. A coach doesn’t carry a hidden agenda, sit on the org chart, or hold a vote in the boardroom. Instead, they provide space for reflection, encouragement, and honest conversation. In the lonely work of changing complex systems, you don’t have to be alone.
Circling Back: Two Examples
In my own leadership journey, I’ve experienced what The Beths sing about: “back to where I started.”
In 1997, I was leading chemical synthesis and quality control in Boston. We restructured how chemists managed their projects, reducing their workload from juggling four or five projects at once down to one or two. For a season, it worked beautifully: faster throughput, fewer backorders, and happier chemists. But over time, the pressures of the business crept back in. The load increased, the backlogs grew again, and the system found its way back to its old equilibrium.
A few years later, we ran an initiative called Pack2Prime, designed to reduce finished goods inventory by rethinking our supply chain. On paper, the system worked. In practice, an unexpected staffing snafu created shortages that rippled through the business. Despite clear evidence that the approach could succeed, the whole experiment was scrapped and the old policies reinstated. We had circled back once more.
Both stories illustrate how easily systems revert, how the “straight line” of improvement is in fact a circle.
When Change Sticks
But not all stories end this way. Some changes do take root, and when they do, they can transform organizations.
Back in 1993, our company president, David Harvey, went to Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, to fire a consultant named Tom Nolan. Instead, after an hour of listening, he realized Nolan had introduced a deceptively simple but powerful framework for improvement:
Clarify the aim: What are we trying to accomplish?
Establish measures: How will we know the change is an improvement?
Identify and test specific changes: What can we try right now?
This became known as the Model for Improvement, and it spread throughout Sigma-Aldrich. The result was a wave of improvements that not only enhanced operations but also contributed significantly to the company’s growth. Decades later, that foundation was part of the $17 billion sale to Merck.
Here was an example of change that didn’t circle back. It became part of the culture. The same loops that once resisted improvement began to reinforce it.
The Resilience of Real Change
This is the hopeful paradox: once change does take root in a complex system, it is remarkably resilient. The same feedback loops that once dragged you backward can, once rewired, sustain momentum forward. What begins fragile can become culture.
So, yes: the straight line is a lie. But the long way is worth it. Because eventually, the system doesn’t just resist change—it begins to embody it.
Stay Connected
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