The Systems Didn’t Break in 2025. They Hit Their Design Limits.

Human Systems Review is a series examining how pressure moves through modern organizations, where it gets absorbed, and why capable people often feel stuck inside “successful” systems.

A lot of people ended 2025 tired in a way that didn’t feel normal.

Not just busy. Not just stretched.
Tired in a deeper, harder-to-name way.

People worked. They adapted. They learned the tools they were told would help. And still, something felt off. The effort kept going up, but the outcomes didn’t seem to move with it.

That disconnect matters.

Because what failed last year wasn’t motivation or capability. It wasn’t resilience or mindset. It was the assumption that systems designed for efficiency would keep working under conditions they were never built to handle.

For a long time, efficiency was the goal. Lean teams. Tight margins. Minimal slack. Everything optimized to move fast and look productive. That model works when the environment is stable and predictable.

But 2025 wasn’t stable. It was volatile. Information changed quickly. Context shifted mid-stream. Decisions had to be made with incomplete data, often under pressure. And efficiency-optimized systems don’t adapt well to that. They don’t bend. They overload.

When that happens, the strain doesn’t disappear. It gets pushed somewhere else. Usually onto the people closest to the work.

That’s why burnout felt so widespread, and so personal, even though it wasn’t. The systems were still “working” on paper. The cost just wasn’t showing up where anyone was measuring it.

AI was supposed to help.

In some ways, it did. But in many organizations, AI was layered onto processes that were already brittle. Workflows weren’t redesigned. Decision rights weren’t clarified. Accountability didn’t move. The speed increased, but the structure stayed the same.

AI doesn’t fix weak design. It amplifies it.

When judgment is unclear, AI makes the ambiguity louder. When processes are fragile, AI makes them fragile faster. And instead of removing cognitive load, it often shifts more of it onto humans, who are then expected to keep up because the system is now “smarter.”

That’s where something more subtle happened.

As friction increased, many people turned inward. They assumed the struggle meant they were falling behind. That they were missing something. That everyone else had figured it out.

Stress slowly turned into shame.

But what was really happening is that adaptive work was being demanded inside systems that weren’t designed to support adaptation. The invisible work of sense-making, judgment, and emotional regulation wasn’t recognized or protected. So people absorbed the cost themselves.

When we talk about adaptive capacity going into 2026, we’re not talking about grit or hustle or doing more with less.

Adaptive capacity is a property of systems.
It shows up in where slack exists.
In how visible decisions are.
In whether learning is safe, or punished.
In whether humans are expected to compensate for structural gaps indefinitely.

Most modern systems optimized those things away. It made them look strong. It made them perform well. And then the environment changed.

That’s the moment we’re in now.

Human Systems Review exists to slow that moment down and look at it clearly. Not to sell tools. Not to offer motivation. But to examine how pressure moves through systems, how risk gets transferred to individuals, and why capable people feel stuck inside structures that are still labeled “successful.”

We’ll talk about hiring systems, AI overlays, leadership incentives, and everyday workflows. But always through the same lens: are these systems built to adapt, or just to perform under assumptions that no longer hold?

I’ll leave you with this:

Where are you putting in real effort right now and getting surprisingly little return?
Where does your work require judgment the system doesn’t quite acknowledge?

That tension is telling you something.

It’s not failure.
It’s a design limit.