“Something big must be broken”

Last week a client told me she was overwhelmed,
with reports from members saying they weren't receiving emails.

Obviously, if you can't trust your CRM to deliver email, that's existential.
That's not a "small bug."
That's a system-level crisis.

And once two or three people say it, the story in your head becomes:
"Something big is broken."

It’s a very human response, and we do it for all kinds of things.

Your engine car makes funny a noise.
The left front tire keeps going low.
The seat belt doesn't retract smoothly.

Surely there's a single, mysterious, expensive root cause.
Will I just have to buy a new car?
Will I just have to live with this "broken" CRM?

But here’s the thing:

Often the mystery feels big and scary precisely because the story is wrong,
because it all feels connected but isn’t.

When problems cluster in time, it's easy to assume common causation.
Our brains are built for pattern recognition.
Correlation feels like proof.
And new problems are easily filed under "The Big Mysterious Problem”,
instead of being addressed one-by-one.

Before you give up on your car (or your CRM) --

Pause and ask:
Are these actually all the same problem?
Or are we just filing them in the same mental folder?

Often you'll find there are distinct, curable causes for each situation.

That's how it goes:
Most chaos shrinks when you separate it.

All the best,
A.