Design Shapes Everything
Why people, marriages, families, and leaders fail
Most of us think our problems come from other people.
If only:
Yet, nothing fundamentally changes. In fact as a thumb rule, things get only worse, or stagnate at levels of apathy and “I don’t care”
Because the real problem was never the people or the person.
It was in the design!
What do we mean by “design”?
Design is not something abstract or technical. Design is simply this:
How things are arranged so that they work well.
A bridge is not tested when no one is on it.
A system is not tested on a good day.
A relationship is not tested when everything is going well and everyone is calm.
Design reveals itself when something goes wrong.
We need to understand the design, and comply with it, if we want things to work out well for us.
This applies to everything from tools, to machines, to vehicles, furniture, homes, buildings, roads, traffic, human behaviour, relationships, marriage, leadership, family business and even your inner emotional/spiritual/psychological life.
Design is not cold or mechanical. Design is profoundly human when it fails but near divine when it works well.
A truth most of us resist is that ‘People behave exactly as the system around them allows, or forces them to behave.’
This is uncomfortable, because it means:
A simple story
Imagine a house with one water tap.The kitchen depends on it. The bathroom depends on it. The washing machine depends on it.As long as the tap works, everything seems fine.
The day it breaks: no cooking, no bathing, no cleaning.
Then the arguments begin: “You should have maintained it!” “Why didn’t you plan better?” “This is your fault!”
But the real issue was obvious from the start :- The house had a bad design. One tap. No backup.
This is called a Single Point of Failure.
And we recreate this mistake everywhere.
Design Principle #1
Single Point of Failure vs Redundancy
A single point of failure means one thing breaks then everything collapses.
Redundancy means if one thing fails, something else takes over and the system continues to work.
How this shows up in Human nature
If your entire sense of worth comes from one thing - your job, your income, your usefulness, your intelligence...then losing it doesn’t hurt you.It shatters you.
That’s not weakness. That’s fragile design. A weak inner structure.
Marriage
When the design implies that spouses are unequal, or that one spouse alone carries all emotional stability, all financial control, all responsibility, the marriage works, till the other spouse continues to play the victim, the helpless individual, the captive in need of rescue...or the “”superior” spouse is exhausted, resentful, or vindictive.
Love didn’t fail as much as the design did. It never gave space for love to exist in the first place...much like a punctured balloon has all the characteristics of a balloon except the main ingredient – air. So such marriages have the all the characteristics of marriage except the knowing, loving and self-emptying and uniting distinctions of marriage.
Leadership & family businesses
When only one person: decides, knows, connects, holds relationships the system looks strong - but is extremely fragile. Where the boss is generally typified as the “control freak”. People literally stop thinking for themselves and stop thinking of creative solutions for problems. All thinking is directed at how-to-keep-the boss-satiated. It works for short periods and on a small scale.
Strong leaders build redundancy. Weak systems depend on heroes.
Design Principle #2
Tight Coupling vs Loose Coupling
Tight coupling means everything reacts instantly to everything else
Loose coupling means things are connected - but not fused
Why this matters emotionally
Human nature
If your mood rises and falls entirely with outcomes or another person’s approval, your inner life is tightly coupled.A small failure equals emotional collapse. A control freak boss then is literally hell!That’s not sensitivity. (though often termed as being hyper sensitive). That’s fragility. Weakness of inner structure.
Marriage
In a tightly coupled marriage, one person’s inner state becomes the system’s state.If one partner has a bad day, the evening is ruined, conversation collapses, the home feels heavy, both partners become dysregulated.
One emotional ripple becomes a system-wide failure. There is no shock absorber.
Not because the partners are immature. Because the relationship has no insulation.
In a loosely coupled marriage, closeness still exists - but emotions don’t cascade unchecked.
One partner can say: “I’ve had a rough day”
And the design enables the other spouse to:
That is not emotional distance. That is healthy design.
“Who am I” and “what is my role” are the two fundamental cornerstones of design in all forms of human relationship ...and extremely important in marriage.
Culture and tradition have been corrupted to provide poor designs that ‘good’, ‘nice’, ‘sweet’ people need to fit into at work and family. If they attempt to break this mould they are branded as bad, high maintenance, difficult people.
The world offers a design which literally shackles all – both male and female – to becoming more of an object and less of a person. Two objects, or one person and an object can never grow together. The object is doomed to stagnation. No person remains a person if s/he objectifies another. That very aspect dictates that the individual is no longer an eternally evolving growing person but a stagnated object with changing needs.
It’s simply not enough to be sweet and nice but unmotivated and undependable.
Neither is it enough to be dependable and motivated but unkind and uncaring.
Who I am and what is my role shapes our inner person, and every organisation, society and family is continually attempting to enforce a who and what on you. That is design. If it’s poor, relationships struggle. If the design is good relationships prosper.
Design Principle #3
No Fallback vs Graceful Degradation
No fallback means things work perfectly or not at all. Zero tolerance for reduced standard.
Graceful degradation means things work less well than our expectation and desire, but we keep going. Drop in standard is taken in our stride and while we don’t compromise, we look internally without blaming externally at what can be done to improve outcomes next time.
Relationships are thus generally designed like a switch and the person plays the role of God. In some cases s/he is willing to overlook all flaws and shortcomings of the other person and accepts a disgraceful degradation of standards.In other cases s/he is unwilling to tolerate the smallest infraction and the other immediately becomes problematic.
People are literally switched on or off.
No fall back in any situation is a binary design - and it kills the inner self of the person who is attached to this design.
Having non negotiables is very different from no fall back.Graceful degradation is the acceptance of things lesser than they could be. Non-negotiables are our ability to not accept the existence of something at any level. Non-negotiables define what must never exist.
Graceful degradation defines how we respond when life is less than ideal. No fall back is the refusal to do so, but the insistence on our standard of perfectness imposed on another with no tolerance for shortfall.
Healthy relationships are designed to survive tired seasons, low romance, uncertainty, emotional dips, financial hardships.
They bend without breaking.
Marriage literally means carrying each other on a journey.
No fall back causes us to drop each other whenever the fun turns to responsible effort, sacrifice and investment.
Grace is not weakness. Grace is resilient design.
Design Principle #4
Centralised Control vs Distributed Authority
Centralised systems rely on one controller
Distributed systems share responsibility
Why families and organisations struggle
Many systems revolve around one decision-maker, one emotional authority, one “head” It feels efficient. It feels strong.Until that person is wrong. Or afraid. Or tired.Then everything freezes.
Distributed authority is not chaos. It is insurance against collapse.
Design Principle #5
Hero Systems vs Process Systems
Hero systems survive because someone keeps rescuing them
Process systems survive because they are well designed
If you are always: fixing, rescuing, holding things together, you feel important. But nothing matures.
In marriages, one rescuer creates dependency. In organisations, heroes hide broken design.
In families, indispensability becomes control.If your system needs heroes, it is badly designed.
The great mistake we keep making
We moralise what is actually a design problem.
We label people as lazy, weak, selfish, irresponsible, greedy, control-freaks, when the system made failure inevitable.
Change the design - and behaviour changes...often without proactive effort.
Whatever your circumstances, ask these three questions -
1. Is there a single point of failure? Who or what cannot fail?
2. How tightly coupled is this? Does one disturbance shake everything?
3. What happens when things go wrong?
Collapse - abandonment of standards altogether – or a graceful adjustment ?
Three core takeaways I hope the reader got are :-
First
Design affects everything -including human nature, relationships, and marriage.
Second
Different designs produce different behaviours - even with the same people.
Third
Make it your practise to
Most of us think our problems come from other people.
If only:
- my spouse were more understanding
- my partner communicated better
- my leader were stronger
- my family behaved differently
- my team member was more sensible
Yet, nothing fundamentally changes. In fact as a thumb rule, things get only worse, or stagnate at levels of apathy and “I don’t care”
Because the real problem was never the people or the person.
It was in the design!
What do we mean by “design”?
Design is not something abstract or technical. Design is simply this:
How things are arranged so that they work well.
A bridge is not tested when no one is on it.
A system is not tested on a good day.
A relationship is not tested when everything is going well and everyone is calm.
Design reveals itself when something goes wrong.
We need to understand the design, and comply with it, if we want things to work out well for us.
This applies to everything from tools, to machines, to vehicles, furniture, homes, buildings, roads, traffic, human behaviour, relationships, marriage, leadership, family business and even your inner emotional/spiritual/psychological life.
Design is not cold or mechanical. Design is profoundly human when it fails but near divine when it works well.
A truth most of us resist is that ‘People behave exactly as the system around them allows, or forces them to behave.’
This is uncomfortable, because it means:
- good people can behave badly in bad designs
- repeated advice doesn’t fix broken structures
- moral failure is often a system failure in disguise
A simple story
Imagine a house with one water tap.The kitchen depends on it. The bathroom depends on it. The washing machine depends on it.As long as the tap works, everything seems fine.
The day it breaks: no cooking, no bathing, no cleaning.
Then the arguments begin: “You should have maintained it!” “Why didn’t you plan better?” “This is your fault!”
But the real issue was obvious from the start :- The house had a bad design. One tap. No backup.
This is called a Single Point of Failure.
And we recreate this mistake everywhere.
Design Principle #1
Single Point of Failure vs Redundancy
A single point of failure means one thing breaks then everything collapses.
Redundancy means if one thing fails, something else takes over and the system continues to work.
How this shows up in Human nature
If your entire sense of worth comes from one thing - your job, your income, your usefulness, your intelligence...then losing it doesn’t hurt you.It shatters you.
That’s not weakness. That’s fragile design. A weak inner structure.
Marriage
When the design implies that spouses are unequal, or that one spouse alone carries all emotional stability, all financial control, all responsibility, the marriage works, till the other spouse continues to play the victim, the helpless individual, the captive in need of rescue...or the “”superior” spouse is exhausted, resentful, or vindictive.
Love didn’t fail as much as the design did. It never gave space for love to exist in the first place...much like a punctured balloon has all the characteristics of a balloon except the main ingredient – air. So such marriages have the all the characteristics of marriage except the knowing, loving and self-emptying and uniting distinctions of marriage.
Leadership & family businesses
When only one person: decides, knows, connects, holds relationships the system looks strong - but is extremely fragile. Where the boss is generally typified as the “control freak”. People literally stop thinking for themselves and stop thinking of creative solutions for problems. All thinking is directed at how-to-keep-the boss-satiated. It works for short periods and on a small scale.
Strong leaders build redundancy. Weak systems depend on heroes.
Design Principle #2
Tight Coupling vs Loose Coupling
Tight coupling means everything reacts instantly to everything else
Loose coupling means things are connected - but not fused
Why this matters emotionally
Human nature
If your mood rises and falls entirely with outcomes or another person’s approval, your inner life is tightly coupled.A small failure equals emotional collapse. A control freak boss then is literally hell!That’s not sensitivity. (though often termed as being hyper sensitive). That’s fragility. Weakness of inner structure.
Marriage
In a tightly coupled marriage, one person’s inner state becomes the system’s state.If one partner has a bad day, the evening is ruined, conversation collapses, the home feels heavy, both partners become dysregulated.
One emotional ripple becomes a system-wide failure. There is no shock absorber.
Not because the partners are immature. Because the relationship has no insulation.
In a loosely coupled marriage, closeness still exists - but emotions don’t cascade unchecked.
One partner can say: “I’ve had a rough day”
And the design enables the other spouse to:
- support without panic
- be present without absorption
- care without collapsing
That is not emotional distance. That is healthy design.
“Who am I” and “what is my role” are the two fundamental cornerstones of design in all forms of human relationship ...and extremely important in marriage.
Culture and tradition have been corrupted to provide poor designs that ‘good’, ‘nice’, ‘sweet’ people need to fit into at work and family. If they attempt to break this mould they are branded as bad, high maintenance, difficult people.
The world offers a design which literally shackles all – both male and female – to becoming more of an object and less of a person. Two objects, or one person and an object can never grow together. The object is doomed to stagnation. No person remains a person if s/he objectifies another. That very aspect dictates that the individual is no longer an eternally evolving growing person but a stagnated object with changing needs.
It’s simply not enough to be sweet and nice but unmotivated and undependable.
Neither is it enough to be dependable and motivated but unkind and uncaring.
Who I am and what is my role shapes our inner person, and every organisation, society and family is continually attempting to enforce a who and what on you. That is design. If it’s poor, relationships struggle. If the design is good relationships prosper.
Design Principle #3
No Fallback vs Graceful Degradation
No fallback means things work perfectly or not at all. Zero tolerance for reduced standard.
Graceful degradation means things work less well than our expectation and desire, but we keep going. Drop in standard is taken in our stride and while we don’t compromise, we look internally without blaming externally at what can be done to improve outcomes next time.
Relationships are thus generally designed like a switch and the person plays the role of God. In some cases s/he is willing to overlook all flaws and shortcomings of the other person and accepts a disgraceful degradation of standards.In other cases s/he is unwilling to tolerate the smallest infraction and the other immediately becomes problematic.
People are literally switched on or off.
No fall back in any situation is a binary design - and it kills the inner self of the person who is attached to this design.
Having non negotiables is very different from no fall back.Graceful degradation is the acceptance of things lesser than they could be. Non-negotiables are our ability to not accept the existence of something at any level. Non-negotiables define what must never exist.
Graceful degradation defines how we respond when life is less than ideal. No fall back is the refusal to do so, but the insistence on our standard of perfectness imposed on another with no tolerance for shortfall.
Healthy relationships are designed to survive tired seasons, low romance, uncertainty, emotional dips, financial hardships.
They bend without breaking.
Marriage literally means carrying each other on a journey.
No fall back causes us to drop each other whenever the fun turns to responsible effort, sacrifice and investment.
Grace is not weakness. Grace is resilient design.
Design Principle #4
Centralised Control vs Distributed Authority
Centralised systems rely on one controller
Distributed systems share responsibility
Why families and organisations struggle
Many systems revolve around one decision-maker, one emotional authority, one “head” It feels efficient. It feels strong.Until that person is wrong. Or afraid. Or tired.Then everything freezes.
Distributed authority is not chaos. It is insurance against collapse.
Design Principle #5
Hero Systems vs Process Systems
Hero systems survive because someone keeps rescuing them
Process systems survive because they are well designed
If you are always: fixing, rescuing, holding things together, you feel important. But nothing matures.
In marriages, one rescuer creates dependency. In organisations, heroes hide broken design.
In families, indispensability becomes control.If your system needs heroes, it is badly designed.
The great mistake we keep making
We moralise what is actually a design problem.
We label people as lazy, weak, selfish, irresponsible, greedy, control-freaks, when the system made failure inevitable.
Change the design - and behaviour changes...often without proactive effort.
Whatever your circumstances, ask these three questions -
1. Is there a single point of failure? Who or what cannot fail?
2. How tightly coupled is this? Does one disturbance shake everything?
3. What happens when things go wrong?
Collapse - abandonment of standards altogether – or a graceful adjustment ?
Three core takeaways I hope the reader got are :-
First
Design affects everything -including human nature, relationships, and marriage.
Second
Different designs produce different behaviours - even with the same people.
Third
Make it your practise to
- see systems, not just people
- fix structure, don’t accuse another’s intent
- build resilience before crisis