Nothing Has to Be Wrong for Everything to Become Too Much
How perfectly sensible decisions accumulate into overwhelm, and why the instinct to add more is making it worse
THE ARGUMENT, IN SHORT Your organisation is not underperforming because something is missing. It is underperforming because of what it has accumulated. Every addition made sense on its own. Together they have become weight the system is now spending its energy carrying. The force has a name, it behaves predictably, and it can be removed.
Five minutes.
Somewhere this week, a leadership team is sitting down to a meeting they have already had.
The same supplier is underperforming. The same target has been missed for a third quarter. The programme that was supposed to land in June is now landing in a month nobody wants to say out loud. Everyone in that room is capable. Everyone has read the pack. Somebody will take an action, the action will be entirely sensible, and in five weeks the same items will reappear with slightly different numbers attached.
What nobody in that room will ask is why the building keeps catching fire.
I have sat in that meeting in more than fifty organisations across twenty-five years. Telecoms, retail, utilities, government, financial services, founder-led businesses where the whole leadership team fits round one table, corporations with tens of thousands of employees and every resource you could ask for. The industries change. The scale changes. The meeting does not.
What unsettled me, slowly at first and then completely, is that I could never find the incompetent people I had been told were causing it.
The word everybody reaches for
Ask people inside an overwhelmed organisation what the work feels like and something strange happens. People who have never met, in different sectors, on different continents, in different decades, independently reach for the same word.
Treacle.
Wading through treacle. Not occasionally, on a bad week, during a crunch. Consistently, as the ordinary texture of the working day.
That word is powerful data, and it is almost always thrown away. It gets heard as a motivation problem, or a resilience problem, or a sign that somebody is not quite up to the role they were promoted into. What it is actually reporting is that the effort going in is wildly out of proportion to what is coming out, and that the person feeling it has noticed the gap without having the language to name its cause.
They are right. The work genuinely is harder than the talent and the resources available should make it.
Nobody decided this
Here is the part that tends to land uncomfortably, because it removes the villain.
No one in your organisation woke up and chose to create the conditions people are now struggling inside. There was no meeting where overwhelm was agreed and minuted. What happened instead is far more ordinary and much harder to see.
A governance step was added after something went wrong, and it was the right response at the time. A second initiative was launched while the first was still bedding in, because the market moved and waiting felt irresponsible. A cost target was set alongside a growth target, and both were defensible in isolation. A programme was paused rather than stopped, so it stayed in the system, quietly consuming attention, technically still alive.
Every one of those decisions was rational at the moment it was made. Most were made by good people under real pressure with incomplete information, which is the only condition in which organisational decisions are ever actually made. Judged individually, you would struggle to fault more than a couple.
They were simply never judged collectively. Nothing in the organisation's calendar or governance asks what is the cumulative weight of everything we have said yes to, and can the system actually carry it. So the decisions accumulate. Sediment, layer on layer, until the organisation is spending an extraordinary proportion of its energy carrying itself.
The design nobody chose is the design that ends up running the place.
The physics of trying harder
There is a force at work here, and it has a name.
In aerodynamics, drag is the force acting directly against forward movement. The important property of drag is not that it exists. It is how it scales. Drag rises with the square of velocity. Go faster and the resistance does not rise politely in step with you. It rises viciously.
Organisations have their own version, and it behaves the same way.
Three major initiatives running simultaneously does not mean a third of capacity on each. It means considerably less than a third, plus the interference every one creates for the others. They are all drawing on the same finite pool of senior attention, the same change-weary teams, the same handful of people who actually know how the billing system works. Each new initiative adds its own weight and multiplies the weight already there.
Which produces the most counterintuitive law in this whole field.
Past a certain point, the harder an organisation tries, the less it achieves.
More effort produces more drag. More drag produces less output. Less output looks exactly like an execution failure, so the organisation responds by adding: more oversight, more reporting, another workstream, a new function to coordinate the other functions. Each of those is a reasonable response to the symptom in front of it. Every one of them raises the drag again.
The cycle is self-sealing, and from the inside it is close to invisible, because at no point does anyone do anything obviously stupid.
The question that never gets asked
Given how expensive this is, why does nobody simply see it?
Partly because looking in the right place is harder. Diagnosing a delivery team is quick, legible and safe. It produces a name and a remedy and a visible signal of decisive action, which is what boards and markets reward in the short term whether or not it touches the cause.
And partly because of something I will come back to in November. By the time information about how heavy the work has become reaches the people who could lighten it, it has usually been edited. Not dishonestly. By people making entirely reasonable judgements about what is worth escalating and what will simply be met with a request to try harder.
So the examination stops at precisely the point where it should begin.
What this means if you are the one carrying it
There is a version of this argument that leaves everybody feeling doomed, and that version is both miserable and wrong.
The most useful thing about drag is that it is mechanical. It is not a character flaw, a culture problem or an inherent feature of your industry. It is weight the system is carrying, which means it can be located, named and taken off.
The step change you have been chasing is not out of reach. In most of the organisations I have worked in it is already sitting inside the business exactly as it exists today, being quietly eaten by something findable. You do not need better people. You have good people. You do not need another transformation layered on top of the two that have not finished yet.
The answer is subtraction, and it is unpopular precisely because it does not look like leadership. Nobody gets promoted for the initiative they cancelled. But removing weight from an overloaded system is the only intervention that improves everything at once, and it is almost always cheaper and faster than the years of misplaced effort that come before somebody finally says it.
None of this requires anyone to have been wrong. That is the whole argument.
Where to start
Before anything else, see the total.
Not the strategic initiatives. Everything currently live in your organisation: every programme, every change, every governance requirement, every standing commitment, including the paused, the nearly finished and the ones with nobody's name against them.
Put it on one page.
Most leadership teams have never seen that page, and almost nobody has ever had to sit with the total. You will feel the temperature change in the room when they do. That feeling is the most honest performance data your organisation will produce all year.
What you do next is a separate question, and a harder one.
The force described in this piece has a name and a pattern. Read the full entry on Drag in the Pattern Library.
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