Looking Through the Right Lens
Sometimes the fastest way to understand a problem isn’t to gather more information. It’s to change the filter through which you’re looking at it.
Several years ago, Scott Adams often wrote that many things which appear irrational suddenly make perfect sense when viewed through the lens of persuasion. Whether you agreed with his conclusions or not, the exercise itself was fascinating because the facts hadn’t changed, the people hadn’t changed, and the events themselves hadn’t changed. Only the filter had changed, and suddenly the behavior looked different.
Good investors do this all the time, looking through the lens of incentives instead of headlines. Biologists might choose evolution, economists scarcity, and engineers systems. None of those perspectives tells the entire story, but each reveals something the others hide.
Recently, I found myself adding another lens to the collection.
Process versus Outcome.
It began while reading Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. Regardless of where you land on the book’s broader arguments, one observation stopped me in my tracks. She quotes the analogy that “Going to therapy is like learning to ski by focusing on the trees.”
Any ski instructor will tell you exactly why that’s a bad idea. The trees aren’t the destination—they’re obstacles. Beginners who stare at them almost invariably drift toward them. The goal isn’t to pretend the trees don’t exist; it’s to keep your attention on the open path where you’re actually trying to go.
That metaphor reaches far beyond therapy.
One of the central themes in Bad Therapy is the possibility of iatrogenesis—the uncomfortable idea that the treatment itself can sometimes contribute to the illness it was meant to solve. Medicine has long accepted this possibility. Every surgery carries risks. Every prescription lists side effects. Every physician understands that interventions can create unintended consequences.
Yet outside of medicine, we seem strangely reluctant to ask the same question. Can a school make learning harder? Can a company make innovation slower? Can a government program create greater dependency? Can therapy itself sometimes reinforce the very struggles it hopes to resolve?
These are uncomfortable questions because they force us to examine not simply whether a process exists, but whether it still serves the outcome it was created to achieve.
That thought stayed with me.
Then, a completely unrelated controversy brought it back into focus.
When the Means Become the Mission
The recent turmoil surrounding 60 Minutes became one of the year’s most public debates about journalism. Some argued the newsroom needed to modernize in order to remain culturally relevant. Others believed protecting traditional journalistic standards mattered more than adapting to changing media habits. Predictably, the conversation quickly dissolved into politics.
I found myself looking somewhere else.
A chart showing decades of declining viewership was far more interesting than the arguments surrounding it. Whether the decline was inevitable because of streaming, changing media habits, or simple demographics almost didn’t matter. The graph wasn’t making a political statement. It was simply asking a question.
If the mission of journalism is to inform the public, what happens when fewer and fewer members of the public are showing up?
That question doesn’t tell us what changes should be made.
It simply refuses to let process become immune from outcome.
The defenders of 60 Minutes often spoke passionately about editorial standards, institutional integrity, and journalistic process. Those things matter. They matter enormously. But process was never supposed to become the mission.
It was supposed to serve the mission.
The same question can be asked without a hint of politics.
If a school graduates students who know less, should we examine the curriculum?
If a business follows every internal procedure while steadily losing customers, should it examine the procedures?
If years of therapy leave someone less resilient instead of more resilient, should we ask whether the treatment deserves scrutiny?
These questions are not attacks.
They are accountability.
Why Institutions Drift
There’s a reason this happens so often.
Processes are comforting because they are teachable, repeatable, and defensible. They give organizations stability and individuals identity. You can point to a manual, a methodology, a certification, or a policy and confidently say, “We followed the process.”
Outcomes are much messier. They expose uncertainty, reveal failure, and force us to admit that faithfully executing a plan does not guarantee success.
Over time, many institutions quietly reverse the relationship. The process begins by serving the outcome. As years pass, however, the relationship can slowly invert until the outcome exists largely to justify the process.
The vocabulary rarely changes.
A school still talks about education.
A hospital still talks about healing.
A corporation still talks about customers.
A news organization still talks about informing the public.
A therapist still talks about helping people.
But the measure of success subtly shifts. Instead of asking whether people are healthier, wiser, better informed, or more resilient, the institution asks whether everyone faithfully followed the approved methodology.
The means quietly replace the end.
This is how institutional drift happens.
Not through malice.
Not through conspiracy.
Often through good intentions repeated so consistently that no one remembers which outcome those intentions were originally meant to produce.
Better Questions
Perhaps the greatest value of a Process versus Outcome lens is that it removes some of the emotion from the conversation.
Instead of asking whether a policy is compassionate, ask what outcome it produces.
Instead of arguing whether a methodology is elegant, ask whether it works.
Instead of defending tradition or celebrating disruption, ask what each is trying to accomplish.
Changing the lens doesn’t automatically produce better answers.
It produces better questions.
And better questions have a way of exposing assumptions that passionate arguments often leave untouched.
The next time you find yourself in the middle of one of today’s endless public debates, resist the temptation to immediately pick a side.
Try changing the lens instead.
You may discover that the disagreement isn’t about politics, education, business, therapy, or journalism at all.
It may simply be about whether everyone is still skiing toward the open slope, or whether we’ve become so fascinated by the trees that we’ve forgotten there was ever a mountain to ski down.
🌱 Seed Thought: Every process was invented to produce an outcome. The moment we become more committed to protecting the process than measuring the outcome, we haven’t preserved the mission—we’ve replaced it.
