Systems Thinking vs. Silos and Fabletics Fiasco

We all love efficiency—until it breaks everything downstream. That’s the funny thing about business processes: everyone wants to be great at their part, but very few step back to see how that part fits into the system.

That’s the difference between silos and systems thinking. Silos obsess over optimizing one function. Systems thinking recognizes that every function is connected—and improving one area without understanding the ripple effects can cause more harm than good.

In the episode, we talked about this using cars as an example. You want to go faster, so you drop in a bigger engine. Great idea—until you realize you now have to upgrade the transmission, the brakes, the exhaust, and maybe even the frame. One fix creates five new problems.

This happens constantly in business. Someone in a department says, “Make this faster.” So the team builds a workaround, automates a step, or adds a shortcut that looks efficient but quietly wrecks the flow for everyone else. It’s a Rube Goldberg machine for modern organizations.

I’ve seen it in manufacturing, software, and data—places where one “simple fix” ripples all the way through accounting, reporting, and operations. Executives roll through and say, “Just paint it candy-apple red; it’ll go faster.” They mean well, but that’s a siloed mindset. A systems thinker asks, “What happens to the rest of the car if we change this?”

And then there’s the human side. We blur ownership all the time. No one knows who owns what process, so gaps appear. Someone steps in to fill it, quietly doing double work just to keep things afloat. Eventually, that hidden hero becomes the only thing holding a bad process together. From the outside, it looks like everything’s running fine—but really, the system is burning people instead of fixing itself.

Then there are the reports. Oh, the reports. The number of times I’ve seen an entire team prop up a broken process just to keep one executive’s favorite metric alive—it’s absurd. The scaffolding eventually goes away, but the report lingers, detached from reality, measuring a ghost of a process that stopped existing three reorganizations ago.

Which brings us to Fabletics. Toby’s story hit the perfect nerve. He ordered something simple, $30 worth of merch for his kid. The marketing was tight, the checkout clean, the whole customer journey frictionless. Until he realized they’d quietly enrolled him in a subscription. No warning, no clarity, and a 45-minute queue to cancel.

That’s process debt in action: a system optimized for short-term growth that silently destroys long-term trust. Marketing crushed it. Finance probably celebrated the recurring revenue. But the system? The system was broken. Because now, every one of those 194 people in the call queue is a lost advocate.

It’s a pattern that goes way back—think Columbia House or BMG, those “12 CDs for a penny” mail-order traps of the 80s and 90s. Except now, the cancellation button is hidden behind a chatbot and three upsell attempts. We’ve digitized the same bad habits, and they’ve scaled beautifully.

Systems thinking asks us to zoom out. It reminds us to question not just can we do this, but should we. Because in the race to optimize every step, businesses often forget that customers, employees, and processes are all connected parts of the same engine.

So before adding a bigger motor to your machine, make sure the rest of the car is ready for the ride.

Process Debt Truth: Every time you optimize a silo without understanding the system, you take on invisible debt. That debt doesn’t show up on a balance sheet—it shows up in customer frustration, employee burnout, and the quiet erosion of trust.

Efficiency isn’t about doing one thing faster. It’s about making sure every part still works when you do.