Every organisation has its dustpan moment — the quick sweep that makes things look tidier without touching the source of the mess. Comedian Sean Locke (RIP 🪦) once joked about turning up to an earthquake site with nothing more than a dustpan and brush. It’s absurd, but it captures something deeper: institutions often arm themselves with tools designed for optics, not solutions.
In systems thinking, this becomes the Dustpan Delusion — the ritual of clearing downstream symptoms while leaving upstream causes untouched. Product professionals know the pattern: urgent fixes shipped to appease dashboards, cosmetic “reforms” that keep stakeholders happy, or process tweaks that mask the cracks instead of repairing them. Each act creates the impression of progress, but underneath, dysfunction continues to flood in.
Scenario: The Leaky Roof
Situation
A tenant reports a water leak in their ceiling after heavy rain.
Impact
Contractors arrive quickly, but instead of repairing the hole in the roof, they repaint the ceiling. For a few days, the stain disappears, and the landlord can claim the problem has been “handled.”
Tension
Each rainfall brings the stain back. The tenant loses faith in the landlord’s promises, frustrated by disruption that solves nothing. Trust erodes, cynicism grows.
Approach
The landlord doubles down on the patchwork — more repainting, more invoices — because it creates visible activity without addressing the structural failure above.
Resolution
Eventually, the leak spreads, mould forms, and the ceiling weakens. The surface looks clean in the short term, but the building itself is degrading.
Incentives & Theatres
Institutions rarely ignore problems out of ignorance — they ignore them because incentives reward the wrong type of progress. In the Leaky Roof scenario, repainting the ceiling keeps the landlord’s records tidy and avoids expensive work. From their perspective, the metric of success is “job completed,” not “problem resolved.”
Systems Thinking helps us name this dynamic. Donella Meadows wrote that the easiest leverage points in a system are often the least effective. Tweaking metrics or appearances is low effort, but it leaves the structural drivers untouched. The Dustpan Delusion thrives here: when the scoreboard looks good, leaders can claim success, even if the system is still failing.
This isn’t just housing. In product management, we see it whenever dashboards are gamed or OKRs are optimised for optics. Goodhart’s Law — “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” — explains why. The moment teams start designing activity around making a KPI tick upward, the KPI stops reflecting reality. The patch becomes theatre: the system performs maintenance for the sake of appearances, not outcomes.
For users, this is exasperating. A repainted ceiling is little comfort when the next storm hits. Likewise, customers don’t care if a company boasts about release velocity if the underlying bugs persist.
The incentive structure rewards manageability, not meaningful redesign — and dysfunction calcifies into routine.
The Dustpan Loop
The Leaky Roof isn’t just a one-off failure — it’s a cycle. Paint, re-stain, repaint, repeat. In systems terms, this is what I call the Dustpan Loop:
Crisis → Patch → Plateau → Repeat
Each iteration creates the illusion of resolution while locking the system into dysfunction. Users, tenants, or customers experience a short plateau of relief, only for the crisis to return with added frustration.
Systems theorists have long described this pattern. Peter Senge’s Fifth Discipline calls it Shifting the Burden — relying on symptomatic fixes instead of addressing root causes. Another archetype, Fixes That Fail, warns that short-term gains can worsen long-term outcomes. In both cases, institutions confuse activity with progress, keeping themselves busy while leaving users trapped in repetition.
Product teams aren’t immune. A critical bug is patched quickly to hit a release deadline, but the root cause in the codebase is never refactored. A “customer success initiative” closes tickets faster, but without fixing the underlying process, the same tickets pile up again next quarter. Each patch satisfies reporting cycles, yet the loop quietly tightens.
Visualising this loop matters. A diagram of the Dustpan Loop makes the futility plain: the arrows keep circling downstream, while the upstream source of dysfunction — the leak in the roof — is never touched. Once you see the cycle, you start spotting it everywhere: in transport delays blamed on “signalling issues,” in healthcare backlogs dismissed as “exceptional demand,” in corporate restructures that rearrange titles but not incentives.
The Dustpan Loop normalises déjà vu. It teaches users to expect disappointment, conditioning them to tolerate futility as the cost of participation.
Diagnosing Upstream vs. Downstream
If the Dustpan Delusion teaches us anything, it’s that not all fixes are created equal. Some deal with root causes; others just tidy the ceiling. The challenge for product professionals — and anyone navigating organisational systems — is learning to tell the difference.
Systems Thinking offers a simple test: upstream vs. downstream.
- Downstream fixes manage symptoms:
- Repainting stains
- Issuing patches
- Spinning up new processes
- Upstream redesigns tackle causes:
- Fixing the roof
- Refactoring the architecture
- Re-aligning incentives
Tools from product and systems practice help sharpen the distinction. Root Cause Analysis (the Five Whys) forces teams to push past optics: if a ticket keeps reappearing, why? Why again? Keep asking until you hit the structural driver. The North Star Metric framework applies the same logic at scale: is the team aligning effort to a true measure of value, or to a proxy that flatters optics?
Public policy debates reinforce this distinction. Dan Heath’s Upstream argues that lasting reform means preventing problems before they cascade downstream. In healthcare, that might mean investing in preventative care rather than applauding shorter waiting times. In product, it means redesigning a workflow to remove friction, not just bolting on a chatbot to deflect support queries.
The Leaky Roof metaphor makes the diagnosis tangible: every time you propose a “repaint,” pause and ask — is this a ceiling patch or a roof fix? If it’s the former, you’re in the loop. If it’s the latter, you’re building resilience.
The difference isn’t academic — it’s existential. Products, teams, and institutions that fail to act upstream condition users to expect futility. Those that act upstream earn trust, because their fixes last.
Conclusion
Dysfunction doesn’t persist because no one notices — it persists because systems reward the wrong kind of action. A freshly painted ceiling, a quick patch, a positive KPI — all signal progress, yet none address the leak above. That’s the Dustpan Delusion in action: theatre mistaken for reform.
The product mindset offers a different lens. When we distinguish between upstream and downstream, we shift from applauding activity to diagnosing alignment. Are we clearing stains or fixing roofs? Are we optimising for optics, or redesigning for outcomes? These questions don’t just expose futility — they create accountability.
For product professionals, this distinction is not optional. Users notice when déjà vu becomes the norm. Teams burn out when every cycle is firefighting. Institutions lose trust when reform looks like theatre. Recognising the Dustpan Loop isn’t fatalism — it’s the first step toward clarity.
That’s the essence of Disruptive Clarity: naming the futility, not to despair, but to open the possibility of better design. In a world full of dustpans, leadership comes from those willing to climb onto the roof.
Relational Observations
Diagnosing Systemic Dysfunction
-
Optics beat outcomes when incentives mislead
Goodhart’s Law in action: targets become theatre, and “done” replaces “resolved.” -
The Dustpan Loop normalises déjà vu
Crisis → patch → plateau → repeat trains users to expect disappointment. -
Activity metrics mask structural rot
Counting tickets closed or releases shipped doesn’t prove upstream causes were fixed. -
Shifting the Burden is institutionalised
Symptom relief earns praise; root-cause redesign is deferred until “later.” -
Downstream work steals capacity from redesign
Firefighting consumes the cycles needed to refactor, re-architect, or realign incentives. -
North Star drift erodes trust
When proxies replace purpose, teams optimise for visibility, not value. -
Five Whys exposes repainting rituals
Ask past the stain to find the hole in the roof — then fix that, not the ceiling. -
Preventative investment signals real leadership
Upstream fixes are quieter today but louder in their lasting effects tomorrow.
