Imagine technical debt, but on a societal scale. Haven't you had to fix some code; or organizational process/workflow if you're not an engineer; where the root cause was layers below the symptom?
Surprising similar strategies: pick an ideal target state; get buy-in from stake holders (fellow engineers or business people); come up with a multi-step plan with milestones; get started. If the milestones aren't getting completed and the target isn't measurably closer, you have a problem.
Rewriting the code over the weekend doesn't work. Using positional power to decree changes doesn't work either. Well, if either of those work then it wasn't that serious of a change anyway.
Regardless, my personal choice for one would be technology.