When fixing the symptoms is worse than doing nothing

In 1958, Mao Zedong looked at China's grain shortages and found his culprit: the sparrow.

Sparrows eat grain. Grain was scarce. People were starving. The logic seemed airtight, so Mao launched what became known as the Four Pests Campaign, targeting rats, flies, and mosquitoes for the disease they spread, and sparrows for the grain they were eating out of the mouths of a starving population.

What followed was one of the most extraordinary mass mobilisations against a single bird species in human history. The military ran eradication operations. Communities were paid for every dead sparrow handed in. Entire villages turned out banging pots, pans, and drums in perfect coordination, because sparrows can't land while there's noise and motion beneath them, so if you keep them airborne for long enough, they simply drop from exhaustion. In one particularly striking episode, staff at the Polish embassy in Beijing refused to let citizens onto the grounds to scare off sparrows sheltering there, so the embassy was surrounded by drummers for two days straight until the birds inside dropped dead and diplomatic staff had to shovel the bodies out.

It worked. Spectacularly. Estimates suggest somewhere over a billion sparrows were killed, some sources put it above two billion, and in places the birds were driven to local extinction.

And then the crops started failing worse than ever.

Because sparrows don't only eat grain. Through summer, most of a sparrow's diet is insects, including the locusts and other crop-devouring pests that sparrows had been keeping in check for as long as anyone could remember. Remove the sparrows and you don't just remove the modest amount of grain they were eating. You remove the single biggest natural control on the insect population that was about to eat everything else.

Locust numbers exploded. Crop yields collapsed even further. The sparrow eradication became one of the contributing factors to the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1961, a catastrophe with multiple causes, but one where researchers have since estimated the sparrow campaign alone accounted for a meaningful share of the collapse in crop yields, on top of an already brutal set of policy failures. Estimated deaths from the famine as a whole range as high as tens of millions.

By 1960, the government had quietly reversed course, dropped sparrows from the pest list, and replaced them with bed bugs. There was just one problem left. Sparrows were now locally extinct across large parts of the country. So China had to import a quarter of a million sparrows from the Soviet Union just to get the ecosystem functioning again.

I tell this story not because it's dramatic, although it is, but because it's the cleanest example I know of a pattern I watch organisations repeat constantly, just with far lower stakes and far less dead wildlife.

Someone identifies a visible, measurable, uncomfortable symptom. Grain is disappearing, so blame the thing visibly eating grain. Complaints are rising, so blame the loudest complainer. Turnover's high, so blame the people rather than what people were exiting from. People are stressed, let’s add another nurse. And then a huge amount of energy, genuine enthusiasm, and organisational will gets thrown at eliminating the visible symptom, without anyone stopping to ask what role that "problem" was actually playing in the wider system.

Sparrows weren't actually the problem. They were quietly doing load-bearing work nobody had noticed, because it wasn't the visible, countable part of what they did. The grain they ate was obvious. The locusts they weren't eating anymore were invisible, right up until it wasn't.

That's the whole argument for looking at systems instead of symptoms. Not because symptoms don't matter, they're often real and worth addressing, but because removing a symptom without understanding what it's connected to doesn't guarantee improvement. Sometimes it guarantees the opposite, and it can take years before anyone can see clearly enough to trace the collapse back to the fix that caused it.

Before you eradicate anything in your organisation, the process, the person, the policy, the "waste," it's worth asking what else that thing might quietly be doing that nobody's counted yet. China found out the hard way that some of its heaviest lifting was being done by something that looked, on the surface, like nothing more than a pest.

How's your leadership system? Want to chat about it? No obligations, just a conversation to see if we can work out why you're going around in circles...