If May 4 can be Star Wars Day because “May the Fourth be with you,” then I am completely on board with the idea that has been circulating online that September 25—9/25—should be Dolly Day. It feels especially meaningful this year as we remember Dolly Parton and the enormous legacy she left behind. There are plenty of ways to celebrate her, from listening to her music and supporting literacy to simply adding a little more kindness and sparkle to the world. For me, Dolly Day also provides the perfect excuse to revisit 9 to 5 and add another entry to my Learning from the Movies series.

I started this series because I love finding lessons in places that were never intended to be textbooks. Movies give us stories, characters, conflicts, and imaginary worlds, but they can also give us a different way to think about very real problems. 9 to 5, released in 1980 and starring Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin, certainly wasn’t designed as a lesson in systems thinking. It is a workplace comedy involving revenge fantasies, an accidental kidnapping, and a truly terrible boss being held captive in his own home. Yet beneath all of that absurdity is a surprisingly relevant lesson about what happens when we stop trying to fix people and start examining the systems in which they work.

When the Obvious Problem Isn’t the Whole Problem

Franklin Hart, played by Dabney Coleman, is an easy problem to identify. He is sexist, dishonest, controlling, and perfectly willing to take credit for other people’s work. Violet, played by Lily Tomlin, is experienced and capable but repeatedly watches opportunities go to men she has trained. Doralee, played by Dolly Parton, has to contend with Hart’s unwanted advances as well as coworkers who have been led to believe that she is having an affair with him. Judy, played by Jane Fonda, arrives with little office experience and quickly discovers that learning her job also means learning how to function within the culture Hart has helped create.

From a traditional problem-solving perspective, Hart is the obvious target: remove the bad boss and solve the problem. Systems thinking complicates that conclusion because it asks us to look beyond the most visible cause. Hart is behaving badly, but he is also operating within an organization that gives him the power to behave that way. There are structures that allow him to take credit for Violet’s ideas, workplace norms that allow rumors about Doralee to flourish, and a hierarchy that gives the women very little influence over decisions affecting their daily lives. Hart is unquestionably part of the problem, but focusing exclusively on him risks missing the conditions that allow the problem to continue.

This is one of the reasons systems problems can be so difficult to recognize. Human beings are much easier to see than systems. When something goes wrong, we can identify the employee who made the mistake, the supervisor who made the decision, or the customer who became angry. Structures, incentives, information flows, workplace norms, and feedback loops are less visible. They are also much harder to blame. Yet those invisible elements can shape behavior just as powerfully as the individuals within them.

The People Closest to the Work Know Things

Through a series of events that I would not recommend replicating as a change-management strategy, Hart is removed from the day-to-day operation of the office. Violet, Judy, and Doralee begin making changes under his name, including flexible working hours, job sharing, an on-site daycare center, and other improvements to employees’ working conditions. The result is not organizational chaos. Instead, morale improves and productivity increases enough that the chairman of the company eventually notices what is happening.

There is an obvious joke in the fact that Hart ultimately receives credit for improvements created by the women working beneath him, particularly after the movie has already established his habit of taking credit for Violet’s ideas. There is also a larger lesson hiding inside the joke. Violet, Judy, and Doralee understand problems within Consolidated that are difficult to see from higher levels of the organization because they are the people experiencing those problems every day.

The people closest to the work know where processes routinely break down. They know which policies create unintended problems, which procedures make simple tasks unnecessarily complicated, and which unofficial workarounds are quietly keeping everything functioning. They also know about the seemingly minor frustrations that may never appear on a report but accumulate over months or years. This does not mean that frontline employees automatically have a complete picture of a complex system or that every proposed solution will work. Their perspective is one part of a larger system. However, leaving that perspective out means making decisions without some of the most important information available.

Organizations often talk about gathering employee input, but there is a difference between asking people what they think and giving them meaningful influence over the conditions in which they work. 9 to 5 takes that idea to an intentionally ridiculous extreme, but the underlying question is worth considering: What might change if the people who encounter a problem every day had more opportunity to participate in redesigning the system that creates it?

What If We Stopped Trying to Fix the Workers?

One of the most interesting things about the transformation at Consolidated is what Violet, Judy, and Doralee do not do. They do not introduce a program to make employees more resilient. They do not hold a workshop on increasing engagement or improving attitudes. They do not teach everyone better time-management strategies or tell employees they need to embrace change. Instead, they change some of the conditions in which people are expected to work.

That distinction continues to matter because organizations frequently respond to systemic problems with individual solutions. If employees are overwhelmed, we offer time-management training. If people are exhausted, we teach resilience. If morale is low, we introduce an employee-engagement initiative. If communication has broken down, we teach communication skills. These approaches can be useful, and I believe strongly in the value of professional development, resilience, communication, and opportunities for people to grow. The problem occurs when an individual intervention becomes a substitute for examining why so many people need the intervention in the first place.

A person can learn excellent time-management strategies and still have an unreasonable workload. Someone can develop tremendous resilience and still become exhausted by a chronically dysfunctional environment. Employees can learn how to communicate more effectively and still work within a culture where speaking honestly carries consequences. When we focus only on changing individual behavior, we can inadvertently ask people to become better at functioning within conditions that should have been questioned.

The employees at Consolidated do not suddenly become more talented when Hart disappears. Their abilities were there all along. What changes are some of the conditions surrounding them, and those changes make different behaviors and outcomes possible. That is an important systems-thinking principle because behavior does not occur independently of environment. People respond to the expectations, incentives, constraints, relationships, resources, and feedback surrounding them. Sometimes the most useful question is not how we can get people to behave differently, but what within the system is making the behavior we want unnecessarily difficult.

Forty-Six Years Later, the Workplace Looks Surprisingly Familiar

Perhaps the strangest thing about revisiting 9 to 5 in 2026 is how recognizable many of its workplace conversations remain. The movie addresses flexible schedules, childcare, pay equity, job sharing, autonomy, recognition, workplace dignity, and the relationship between employee well-being and organizational performance. It also questions an assumption that continues to surface in discussions about work: whether employees need close supervision and rigid structures in order to be productive.

Of course, workplaces have changed enormously since 1980, and it would be unfair to pretend that nothing has improved. Technology alone has transformed what work looks like, where it can happen, and how people communicate. Expectations around harassment, discrimination, leadership, and employee rights have also evolved. Yet it is difficult to watch the changes introduced at Consolidated without noticing how many of them resemble conversations organizations are still having nearly half a century later.

That may be one reason 9 to 5 remains more than a nostalgic workplace comedy. Its exaggerated story is tied to questions that were real in 1980 and remain real today: Who gets to make decisions about work? Whose knowledge counts? What responsibilities do organizations have for the conditions they create? When employees struggle, how quickly do we assume the solution is to change the employee rather than examine the workplace?

The Lesson from 9 to 5

Dolly Parton’s legacy extends far beyond one movie or one song. Her work in literacy, philanthropy, entertainment, and business reflected a remarkable ability to take people seriously without always taking herself seriously. That makes returning to 9 to 5 on 9/25 feel particularly appropriate. The movie is funny and intentionally outrageous, but its humor works because the frustrations underneath it are recognizable.

The lesson I take from the movie is not simply that terrible bosses create terrible workplaces, although Franklin Hart certainly provides plenty of evidence for that argument. It is that changing one person is not the same thing as changing a system. If the structures that concentrate power, discourage participation, reward the wrong behaviors, or make people’s lives unnecessarily difficult remain intact, replacing one individual may only change the name on the office door.

Systems thinking asks us to become curious before we rush toward a solution. When people are struggling, disengaged, frustrated, resistant, or exhausted, there may certainly be things they can learn or do differently. There may also be something happening around them that is producing exactly the behavior we are seeing. The challenge is being willing to look beyond the person standing in front of us and ask what else might be contributing to the outcome.

Violet, Judy, and Doralee did not become better employees when they took control of Consolidated. They were capable employees who finally had the opportunity to change some of the conditions preventing people from doing their best work. Forty-six years after 9 to 5 first appeared in theaters, that may be the part of the story most worth revisiting. Before we decide that people need to be fixed, trained, motivated, or made more resilient, perhaps we should first ask whether there is something about the system that needs to change.