Burnout by Design: How Our Systems Create Stress
Rethinking stress from the inside out: individual, team, and organizational design
Stress is everywhere in today’s workplaces—from the individual trying to stay afloat, to teams navigating tension and misalignment, to entire organizations struggling under the weight of complexity and change. We tend to treat stress as a personal failure or an HR issue. But what if it’s something else entirely?
In my three-part series on systems thinking and stress, we explored a new mindset:
Stress is not just an emotional state. It’s a systems output.
Part 1: The Individual System
We began by looking at individuals—not just as people experiencing stress, but as systems themselves, constantly responding to internal and external signals. When the environment lacks safety, clarity, or recovery time, the nervous system reacts accordingly: with anxiety, fatigue, and eventual burnout.
The takeaway? Self-care is important, but no amount of breathwork can compensate for a system that’s actively creating overwhelm. We have to start by understanding the signals our stress is sending—not suppressing them, but listening to what they reveal about the system around us.
The System Behind Your Stress (And Why Discipline Isn’t the Fix)
If you’re feeling burnt out, anxious, or stuck on a hamster wheel—you’re not alone. And you’re not doing it wrong.
Part 2: The Team System
Next, we zoomed out to the team level. Here, stress often arises not from the work itself, but from misalignment, unclear expectations, and relational tension. Teams are systems too—and the quality of relationships, trust, and communication loops determines how well they adapt under pressure.
Stress on teams is often a signal of misalignment: between stated goals and real incentives, between values and behaviors, between individuals and the group. Leaders who want to reduce stress must look beyond surface dynamics and ask: What patterns are we unintentionally reinforcing?
Part 3: The Organizational System
Finally, we took the widest view: the organization as a whole. Here, stress often stems from structural issues—misaligned goals, broken feedback loops, siloed decision-making. One of the most common culprits is sub-optimization: when individual teams succeed at the expense of the whole.
This isn’t about bad actors. It’s about a system doing exactly what it was designed to do—even if it’s burning people out in the process.
The solution? Not another wellness perk, but a redesign of how work works. Clarifying purpose. Aligning incentives. Reducing friction. And most importantly, creating a system that supports people not just as workers, but as humans.
Stress is a Signal
Across all three levels—individual, team, and organization—the core message is the same:
Stress isn’t a personal flaw or a bad mood. It’s a signal. A clue that something in the system needs attention, alignment, or change.
If we can learn to see stress not as a nuisance to be managed, but as data to be decoded, we can build workplaces that are not only more effective—but more humane.
Let’s design better systems. For ourselves, our teams, and the future of work.