The Strategic Design Failure Behind Today’s Workforce Crisis

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations face unprecedented challenges in managing their workforce. According to Gallup’s 2024 research, U.S. employee engagement has reached an 11-year low (Gallup, 2025), while the World Economic Forum reports that skills gaps are the primary barrier to business transformation through 2025-2030 (WEF, 2025). But what if we’ve been fundamentally misdiagnosing the problem?

The Real Root Cause: Ignoring How Throughput Increases Affect People

The workforce crisis we’re experiencing isn’t merely an HR problem—it’s a strategic design failure stemming from how we’ve implemented technology to increase throughput without considering its effects on the humans doing the work.

For decades, we’ve pursued productivity and efficiency gains by layering technology into workflows with a singular focus: how much more output can we extract from our workforce?

Recent research shows that 71% of full-time employees report feeling burnt out, with 65% struggling with employer demands on their productivity (Upwork Research Institute, 2025).

We didn’t ask what happens to human cognition, wellbeing, and creativity when we dramatically increase the volume and pace of information they must process. We didn’t examine how digital acceleration would impact decision-making, relationship-building, or meaning-making. We simply measured the input-output ratio without measuring the human cost.

This approach happened because we stopped seeing people as people.

Studies reveal that digital overload has a severe negative impact on employee productivity, with 60% of people experiencing high stress and burnout due to online communication fatigue (Brosix, 2025). We began viewing employees as resources to optimize rather than humans with cognitive limits, emotional needs, and unique perspectives.

We didn’t consider what they needed to effectively consume more information and produce more output in healthy, sustainable ways. We simply expected adaptation without redesigning the underlying systems to support human flourishing alongside technological advancement.

The result? A nationwide epidemic of anxiety, burnout, and mental health challenges. According to the World Health Organization, twelve billion working days are lost every year to depression and anxiety alone (WHO, 2025).

HR departments have attempted to address these issues through training, hiring initiatives, and culture programs—but these efforts can’t succeed when the underlying strategic design remains flawed. In fact, 73% of HR leaders prioritize processes over people in their HR teams (PeopleSpheres, 2025).

What we failed to consider was how these throughput increases would affect people.

A Strategic Design Failure, Not an HR Problem

This fundamental oversight is a failure of strategic design. When we don’t thoroughly consider how our strategic plans will manifest in the real world, we force people to spend their workdays navigating encumbrances—dealing with what we forgot to plan for during strategic design. Research indicates that workers spend 88% of their workweek communicating across multiple channels, with the average employee devoting 9 hours per week (about 23% of their time) just on collaboration tools like email and chat (Brosix, 2025). People become burdened with managing the consequences of our incomplete planning, absorbing the cognitive and emotional toll of systems that weren’t designed with their human experience in mind.

The responsibility for this failure doesn’t rest with HR but with executive leadership:

• CEOs who shape business strategy without considering its human implications
• COOs who build systems without adequately addressing how people will interact with them

Yet we’ve consistently delegated the resulting problems to HR, asking them to fix symptoms without addressing the root cause. We’ve told HR to improve retention, engagement, and productivity without acknowledging the strategic design flaws creating these issues in the first place.

Disney’s Cultural Misstep and America’s Current Crisis

A classic example of strategic design failure emerged when Disney attempted to bring its theme park to France in 1992. The company failed to consider fundamental cultural differences in the workforce and customer base, resulting in catastrophic financial losses of $2 billion by 1994 (MBA Knowledge Base, 2024). Their strategic plan didn’t account for how real people would interact with and implement their vision.

Disney made critical errors by ignoring French culture and work practices: implementing a strict American dress code that violated French workplace norms, prohibiting alcohol in a culture where wine with meals was standard, and filling top management positions with Americans who lacked cultural understanding (Birdhouse Marketing, 2023). As one researcher noted, Disney “chose to make assumptions about the preference of Europeans, which turned out that most of those assumptions were wrong.” The company failed to recognize that success required thinking locally while acting globally.

America’s current workforce crisis follows a similar pattern. We’ve implemented technologies that dramatically increase information processing requirements without understanding how this affects people’s ability to apply meaningful judgment. Recent studies show that information overload and the fear of missing out on information (IFoMO) are significant risk factors for employee mental health and can lead to greater exhaustion (Marsh et al., 2024).

We’ve designed workflows that maximize throughput while ignoring how this acceleration impacts the human experience.

We’ve optimized for quantity of output without considering what happens to quality, creativity, and wellbeing when people are constantly processing more with less time to think.

The Missing Leadership Connection

The root of our workforce problem is the failure to consider how increased throughput affects people during strategic planning, not just how much more we can get out of them. Leaders prioritized the question “How much more can people produce?” without asking “What happens to people when they’re processing this much more information?”

Research confirms that 32% of workers cite “heavy workload” and overwork as the primary causes of their workplace stress, followed by “long hours” (27%) and “too many meetings” (20%) (TravelPerk, 2025). This human-centered consideration should have been central to strategic planning (CEO) and operationalization (COO).

HR knows something fundamental is missing. They can feel it in exit interviews, engagement surveys, and retention statistics. But they’ve been tasked with solving a problem that originated outside their domain.

Building a Culture of Strategic Thinkers

HR isn’t helpless in this situation. While they can’t unilaterally redesign business strategy, they can foster something equally powerful: a culture of strategic thinking throughout the organization. Research indicates that job design significantly impacts employee mental health, with studies showing that employees in roles with high demands but low control are particularly susceptible to mental health issues (REBA, 2025).

Business strategy and strategic thinking are distinct concepts:

• Business strategy defines where the organization is going and how it will get there
• Strategic thinking is the cognitive approach individuals use to understand interconnections, anticipate consequences, and make decisions that align with long-term goals

When people throughout an organization think strategically, the entire mindset and culture change. The focus shifts from making bosses happy or avoiding mistakes to making things work with the future in mind. Design thinking principles offer a fundamentally different approach that puts humans at the center of solutions (IDEO, 2025).

Five Cultural Resources That Foster Strategic Thinking

Strategic thinking doesn’t emerge from traditional training programs or one-off workshops. It flourishes when deliberately cultivated through an organization’s cultural foundation. Research from McKinsey shows that companies with strong cultures achieve three times higher total return to shareholders than their competitors (McKinsey, 2018). Unlike traditional training that focuses on specific skills, developing strategic thinking requires embedding specific cultural resources throughout the organization.

At The Mean MBA, we don’t train strategic thinkers—we create the conditions that allow strategic thinking to naturally flourish. Everyone can do the same.

Here are the five core cultural resources that make build a culture of strategic thinking:

1. Purpose & Direction – People need to know where they’re going and why it matters, or they’ll guess. And guessing leads to anxiety, mistakes, and disengagement. McKinsey research identifies strategic clarity as one of the four foundational “power practices” that have disproportionate effects on organizational performance (McKinsey, 2024).
2. Psychological Safety & Acceptance – People need to know they won’t be punished for asking questions, making mistakes, or thinking differently. Without safety, people protect themselves — not the company’s interests.
3. Connection & Perspective – People need to see the whole, not just their slice. Strategic thinking dies in isolation. It grows through collaboration and visibility.
4. Feedback & Discipline – People need feedback that guides, not shames. Discipline that corrects early, not punishes late. This is what keeps teams aligned and resilient.
5. Space to Try & Room to Grow – People need room to practice, stretch, and fail forward. We hire them for their potential — we have to make space for it to develop.

These resources don’t work in sequence—they work in sync, continuously shaping how we show up and how strategy either sticks or slips away.

Culture as a Business Reality, Not a Buzzword

Why focus on culture? Because culture isn’t a marketing word or aspirational concept. Culture in business is the collective way people think, behave, and make decisions when no one is watching.

It’s the invisible system that shapes:

• How people treat each other
• How they prioritize under pressure
• How they respond to challenges, feedback, and uncertainty
• What they believe is rewarded—and what they believe is risky

Culture isn’t what’s written on the walls. It’s what’s reinforced day-to-day through actions, conversations, leadership decisions, and what gets tolerated or corrected.

If we want people to think, behave, and make decisions aligned with business goals even when no one is watching, we must teach them what we want and create conditions where those behaviors thrive.

Research from IBM shows the success of this approach—since 2013, they’ve built a workforce of over 20,000 human-centered design professionals and trained more than 200,000 employees in human-centered practices, creating a strategic capability that drives innovation (IBM, 2025).

A New Approach to Workforce Challenges

Addressing today’s workforce challenges requires a fundamentally different approach:

1. Acknowledge the strategic design failure – CEOs and COOs must recognize that workforce challenges stem from a singular focus on extracting more output without considering how throughput increases affect the humans doing the work.
2. Bring HR to the strategic table – HR should be involved in planning and implementing strategic initiatives, asking: “How will increased throughput affect our people?” and “What do they need to process more without becoming overwhelmed?”
3. Monitor human impact – After implementation, leadership must consistently assess how throughput changes are affecting people’s wellbeing, creativity, and judgment, not just productivity metrics.
4. Develop the five cultural resources – Systematically build the cultural conditions that foster strategic thinking throughout the organization, enabling people to identify and address the effects of increasing throughput. Design thinking offers a human-centered approach that prioritizes empathy, experimentation, and systems thinking (IDEO, 2025).
5. Redesign work for human thriving – Rethink how technology can support human judgment rather than simply accelerating information flow, ensuring workflows incorporate time for meaningful processing, not just increased production. Research indicates that senior management serving as role models by opening up about their own struggles can help employees overcome stigma (McKinsey, 2021).

Conclusion: The Path Forward

The workforce challenges we face today reflect a fundamental disconnect between our pursuit of increased throughput and understanding how these changes affect the humans doing the work.

We’ve focused exclusively on how much more people can produce without considering what happens to them when they’re processing exponentially more information with the same cognitive resources.

Technology implemented solely to maximize output, without consideration for its effects on human experience, has created unsustainable working conditions that no amount of HR intervention can fully address.

People are struggling not because they’re resistant to change, but because we’ve designed systems that overwhelm human capacity rather than enhance it.

The solution lies in recognizing this as a strategic design challenge that requires leadership attention from CEOs and COOs working in concert with HR and other leaders.

By addressing the root cause—how throughput increases affect people—and building a culture of strategic thinking, organizations can create environments where both people and productivity thrive in sustainable harmony.

As we navigate the complex workforce landscape of 2025 and beyond, the organizations that succeed will be those that integrate human considerations into their strategic design, fostering cultural resources that enable everyone to contribute their best thinking to the collective success.

How The Mean MBA Can Help Transform Your Approach

At The Mean MBA, we don’t implement business systems —we help organizations develop the strategic thinking capabilities essential for addressing the root causes of today’s workforce challenges.

Research shows that organizations that apply strategic design thinking can “move the needle on retention in the short-term, and meaningfully differentiate employers in the markets where they compete for talent in the long-term” (Deloitte, 2021).

It works.

How We Help Organizations Build Strategic Thinking Cultures:

Cultural Resource Assessment and Development: We help you evaluate and strengthen the five core cultural resources needed for strategic thinking to flourish across your organization. Studies show that creating a supportive culture and offering resources to support employees can mitigate the negative effects of technology overload (Hexicor, 2023).

Executive Alignment Workshops: We facilitate sessions that bring CEOs, COOs, and HR leaders together to redesign strategic approaches with human considerations at the center. Research indicates that executive partnership from the beginning is “absolutely critical for any mental well-being and mental-health employee program to be successful” (McKinsey, 2021).

Strategic Design Thinking Singure Intensive: Our structured intensive teach leaders at all levels how to think strategically about the human implications of business decisions. Design thinking has been shown to effectively address limitations in digital interventions by focusing on empathy, iteration, and human-centricity (JMIR, 2019).

Work Design Facilitation: We guide teams through the process of redesigning work to leverage technology while honoring human needs and capabilities.

Strategic Leadership Coaching: We provide one-on-one and group coaching for executives navigating the complex intersection of business strategy, operational systems, and human needs. Research shows that increasing the variety of roles and rotating work among team members may cause temporary dips in efficiency but leads to greater long-term productivity (REBA, 2025).

Ready to Address the Root Cause of Your Workforce Challenges?

Contact us today to discuss how The Mean MBA can help your organization develop the strategic thinking culture needed to transform workforce challenges into opportunities for sustainable growth.