A few years ago, I worked as a Project Manager for a marketing agency. What most people did not know was that I wasn’t simply managing marketing projects. Part of my job was to conduct root-cause analysis and privately address what I found with the VP of Operations. The agency was losing clients, and part of my assignment was to conduct root-cause analysis within the PMO. No one ever told me the two were connected, but I wondered whether leadership believed they might be.
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| Ganna Walska Lotusland |
I worked alongside another Project Manager, a smart guy with a project management certification whose vertical happened to be one of the problematic ones. He didn’t know that evaluating his project pipeline was part of my assignment. His failure to follow project management best practices had already been escalated. He also had reluctance to escalate problems early enough to keep them from affecting clients.
One Client Success Manager was a recurring problem. She routinely failed to turn in work on time, delaying mail drops, sometimes by more than a month, with each delay rippling into next mail piece that followed.
One day, what began as casual conversation drifted toward this particular CSM. We were both laughing at how absurd the workflow had become. So I asked the obvious question: Why don’t you escalate it?
His answer was equally predictable. He didn’t want to rat anyone out. He didn’t want to create a rift.
I can understand that answer from someone who isn’t responsible for managing people, workflow, or operations. From a Project Manager, it is harder for me to accept. One of the fundamental responsibilities of project management is protecting the workflow. We are supposed to see trouble coming, address it before it arrives, and build alternatives before a delay becomes a crisis. A clearly identified pattern that damaged deliverability had no place to remain silent in the workflow.
It is why I roll my eyes whenever I’m asked what I do when a project misses a deadline. By the time the deadline is missed, something has already gone wrong. The escalation should have happened earlier. Plan B should already be moving. The delay should either be absorbed, compensated for, or renegotiated into something everyone can actually live with.
Circling back to the Project Manager and the CSM: they had worked together for months, possibly close to a year. Then he said something I didn’t expect.
He hoped she would change.
I asked him a very simple question: Did he expect her to change while he changed nothing about the way he handled the problems she created in the workflow?
He looked genuinely stunned on my screen.
Silence.
Then he said something that made me smile: That’s Einstein’s definition of insanity. Expecting something different while doing the same thing.
And then, rather quickly, he exited the Zoom. Or was it Teams?
He understood.
By his own definition, he was the one doing something insane.
Tolerance.
That word has been creeping around my mind for years now.
Have we become too tolerant?
The question first surfaced one morning as I was walking along Sunset Boulevard on my way to the office and encountered a completely naked woman. It was around eight in the morning. The street was full of cars. I was minding my own business, gingerly making my way to work, and there she was.
She wasn’t hiding. She wasn’t behaving as though anything were unusual. She simply walked down Sunset as though she were fully clothed.
I kept walking, wondering what, exactly, I was supposed to do. Call 911? Spend an hour on hold with LAPD’s nonemergency line? By the time anyone was dispatched, she would probably be long gone.
The question became a more frequent visitor after that.
It surfaced as I walked past homeless encampments. As I watched people behave violently on L.A. Metro light-rail trains and city streets. As I stood in stores waiting for someone with a key to liberate toothpaste and razors from locked cabinets, part of the now-standard retail response to theft across much of California.
It surfaced again while listening to so-called evangelists turn amplification equipment toward residential neighborhoods, their sermons carrying for blocks. I understand their right to preach in a public space and to practice the religion of their choosing. But what about mine? What about my right, inside my own space, to practice the religion of my choosing—or no religion at all—without being made an involuntary member of someone else’s congregation simply because they brought a sufficiently powerful speaker?
Somewhere amid what I have come to think of as noise terrorism, the city’s noise ordinance seems to have been lost entirely. There are times when the preaching is so loud that I cannot listen to music or stream a show inside my own space, home, without putting in AirPods. Their right to religious expression apparently travels through walls. Mine, meanwhile, requires noise cancellation.
At some point, tolerance stops looking like patience.
At some point, it starts looking remarkably similar to doing the same thing over and over again while hoping something will change.
And perhaps some of the more than 77 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 arrived at their own version of that conclusion. Not necessarily about any of these particular examples, but about the country itself. They believed something was not working, and continuing to do the same thing while hoping for a different result no longer made sense to them. For some, choosing Trump may have been less an embrace of continuity than a deliberate rejection of it—a willingness to choose disruption because tolerating what they believed had failed them had become the less acceptable option.
Isn’t it possible that, in our pursuit of a positive culture—one that leads with empathy, sometimes at the expense of civility and accountability—we have allowed bad, harmful, even dangerous behavior to go without consequence?
Somewhere along the way, understanding why someone behaves badly began to compete with our willingness to say that the behavior itself is unacceptable.
We search for the explanation. Trauma. Poverty. Addiction. Mental illness. Marginalization. Anger. Religion. Circumstance. Desperation. There can be truth in all of them. Context matters. Empathy matters. I would argue that both are necessary if we have any interest in solving problems rather than merely punishing people for having them.
But an explanation is not an exemption.
Empathy should help us understand what happened. It should not require everyone else to absorb what happened indefinitely.
That distinction seems to have become strangely impolite.
We have become very good at discussing the needs of the person creating the disruption and considerably less comfortable discussing the needs of everyone required to live around it. The person screaming on the train may be in crisis. The person sitting three feet away from him still deserves to get home safely. The person sleeping on the sidewalk may have a heartbreaking history. The sidewalk still has to function as a sidewalk. The evangelist has a right to preach. The person several blocks away has a right to sit in her own living room without needing noise-canceling headphones to escape someone else’s religion.
Two things can be true at once. In fact, adulthood rather inconveniently requires it.
Compassion does not require surrendering standards. Understanding someone does not require tolerating everything that person does. Protecting one person’s dignity should not require quietly transferring the consequences of his or her behavior to everyone else.
And consequences are not inherently cruel.
Sometimes consequences are simply information.
This is where I return to that Project Manager.
For months, the Client Success Manager had been receiving information from the system, whether anyone intended to send it or not. Her work could be late. A mail drop could be delayed by weeks. The next campaign could be affected. And still, the Project Manager would maneuver around the problem rather than escalate it because he did not want to create conflict.
He thought he was preserving the relationship.
What he was actually preserving was the behavior.
Why would she change?
The system had already changed for her.
Of course, this one dysfunctional relationship did not exist in isolation, nor would I pretend that it single-handedly determined the fate of an entire company. But after multiple rounds of layoffs, the agency eventually closed. By then, more than 100 people had lost their jobs.
That is the uncomfortable thing about dysfunction: accommodating it does not eliminate its consequences. It merely determines who absorbs them, and for how long.
Everyone else absorbed the delay. Everyone else rearranged the schedule. Everyone else dealt with the consequences. She had been given very little reason to believe that anything needed to be different.
Until, eventually, there was no system left to rearrange.
That is the part of tolerance we rarely discuss: tolerance does not merely leave something alone. Sometimes it teaches.
It teaches us what will be accepted.
It teaches us which boundaries are real and which ones are decorative.
It teaches the person behaving badly that everyone else will move.
And eventually, everyone does.
We walk around the encampment. We move train cars. We wait for the toothpaste. We put in the AirPods. We modify our routes, our habits, our homes, our expectations and, eventually, our definition of normal.
Then we wonder why nothing changes.
Perhaps that is what has bothered me about the word tolerance all these years. It has been elevated into something almost automatically virtuous, when tolerance without discernment is not necessarily virtue at all.
There are things worth tolerating.
People who look different from us. Worship differently from us. Love differently from us. Think differently from us. Vote differently from us. Live lives we would never choose for ourselves.
That is tolerance at its best: the recognition that another person does not need our permission to exist differently.
But behavior is not identity.
And tolerating difference is not the same thing as tolerating harm.
A functioning society has to be capable of making that distinction without immediately confusing boundaries with cruelty, accountability with intolerance, or disagreement with hatred.
Otherwise, we end up doing exactly what that Project Manager did.
We accommodate. We compensate. We quietly rearrange everything around the problem. We hope the problem will recognize our generosity and voluntarily disappear.
Then, after months or years of doing precisely the same thing, we look around and ask why nothing has changed.
My former colleague needed only a few seconds of silence on Zoom to recognize the absurdity of it.
He hoped she would change.
I asked what he was willing to change.
Maybe that is the question worth asking ourselves now.
Not whether we have enough empathy. Not whether we are tolerant enough. Perhaps we have spent so much time asking those questions that we have neglected the far less comfortable one:
What are we tolerating that we already know is not working?
Because empathy without boundaries can become permission. Tolerance without accountability can become accommodation. And accommodation, repeated long enough, can become permanence.
Then we are no longer waiting for change.
We are practicing Einstein’s definition of insanity.
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