Insight

Start Where You Are Standing

The instinct when a structural problem becomes visible is to reach for something proportionate to it. A programme, a mandate, a workstream with a name. Something large enough to match the size of what is wrong.

That instinct is what kills most of this work.

Anything requiring funding requires a case, which requires a forecast of benefits nobody can honestly produce yet, which delays the start by a quarter and attaches the whole thing to a sponsor whose priorities will change. Anything requiring a mandate can have the mandate withdrawn. Anything with a name can be cancelled by someone who wants the budget for something else, and structural work is unusually easy to cancel because its results are absences and absences do not defend themselves.

The alternative is unglamorous and it compounds. Settle one ownership question that has been unresolved long enough that people work around it. Move one recurring decision to the person who already has the information. Retire one report that nobody reads and see whether anyone asks. Put one person who experiences the outcome in the same room as the people producing it.

None of those need permission. All of them are reversible if wrong. Each returns a small amount of capacity to the work that creates value, and — more usefully — each produces evidence, which is the only currency that buys the next, larger move.

An improvement nobody had to fund is an improvement nobody can cancel.

Start with the friction you can reach from where you are standing. It is almost always closer than the one you have been thinking about.