Dustin Snyder has spent two decades watching organizations repeat the same cycle. A consultant gets hired. A survey goes out. A training program launches. Six months later, leadership is looking at the same dysfunction they started with. The engagement scores shift a few points. The same people leave. The same tensions resurface in different meetings with different names attached.
He has a specific explanation for why this happens, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the consultants or the sincerity of leadership’s intent.
The problem is that most organizational interventions treat behavior as the cause rather than the output. When a team is disengaged, the assumption is that someone needs to change their attitude, improve their communication, or develop their leadership skills. The behavior is treated as a personal failing rather than a predictable response to a specific set of conditions. Fix the person, the logic goes, and you fix the organization.
Snyder’s work begins from the opposite premise. Human behavior inside organizations follows cause-and-effect logic just as reliably as any other complex system. Change the conditions people are operating inside, and behavior changes. Not because anyone worked harder or led better, but because the inputs changed and the outputs responded accordingly.
This is the foundation of Strategic Workforce Insight Mapping, or SWIM, the diagnostic methodology Snyder developed and deploys through his firm Wayforward. Rather than prescribing interventions before understanding root causes, SWIM maps the systemic factors producing dysfunction in a specific organization and delivers a diagnostic report with enough specificity to act on.
The implications are significant. If behavior is a system output, then replacing people who are behaving badly rarely solves anything. The system that produced those behaviors will produce them again in whoever fills the vacant seats. Snyder has watched this play out repeatedly in organizations that concluded a difficult employee was the problem, removed that person, and watched the same pattern emerge in their successor within months.
What changes behavior at scale is redesigning the conditions. That requires knowing which conditions are producing which behaviors and why. That knowledge comes from rigorous diagnostic work, not intuition, not guesswork, and not a survey instrument that confirms what everyone already suspected.
The science behind this draws on a convergence of disciplines. Behavioral economics has documented how context shapes choice in ways that override individual intention. Organizational psychology has mapped the relationship between workplace conditions and performance outcomes. Family systems theory demonstrates how roles and patterns persist across personnel changes. Complexity science provides tools for analyzing how individual-level rules produce emergent organizational behavior. Six Sigma brings the discipline of measuring inputs and outputs in systems that are not obviously mechanical. Nobody had synthesized these fields into something a leader could actually deploy. That is what SWIM does.
Steve Davis, CEO of Tapecon Medical Devices, described his experience with the report as transformative in ways he had not anticipated. The diagnostic findings did not indicate his organization. They gave his leadership team a shared fact base to move from. In his words, the report got leadership aligned quickly and produced a just-do-it mindset that, two years later, still feeds directly into his company’s strategic plan.
Snyder’s book, Sink or SWIM, is written for executives ready to stop guessing about why their organizations are underperforming. The foreword is written by the President of the American Medical Association. Snyder serves on the Harvard Business School Research Advisory Group.
Organizations that keep watching the same problems resurface are not failing because they lack good intentions. They are working from an incomplete model of what is driving the behavior they are trying to change. Getting that model right is where transformation actually begins.
