We have become very good at talking about individual performance: capability, motivation, engagement, leadership and development. But what if that is only a small - and inherently biased - part of the story? I recently moved out of People work completely and into a COO remit, with organisational performance among my responsibilities. It forced me to question what I thought drives it. What I learned is that many of the things we experience as "people problems" are symptoms of something else: poor decision-making, organizational friction, ineffective processes - a business that makes it harder than it needs to be for good people to do good work. In this interactive session, I’ll share what I found and we’ll see how universal those challenges are across our businesses. I’ll then take you through how I tackled them, step by step - what worked, what didn’t, and what surprised me along the way. Finally, I’ll open it up to hear what you’ve tried and what we can all steal from this community while we’re together and apply in our own organisations.