In a mess, don't fix everything

Walk into a business that's truly struggling and you won't be short of things to fix. The list writes itself, it's long, and most of it is real.

The instinct, and the pressure from everyone watching, is to take the whole list on. Draw up the big plan, stand up the workstreams, show you're across all of it. A hard problem seems to call for a proportionate response, so the response gets sized to the problem: the offsite, the steering committee, the eighteen-month roadmap. Most of that is theatre. It produces the feeling of action and a great many documents, and the thing you were worried about does not move.

What moves it is duller. You find the one cause most likely to be load-bearing, take a single unglamorous swing at it, and watch for green shoots within days. If they show, you push. If they don't, you were wrong, and you swing somewhere else, having spent a week finding out rather than two quarters.

I took over a loss-making business unit once and had it cash-flow positive in about six weeks. There was no programme, and nothing I'd want much credit for. We found the single part of the operation that was already working, stopped touching everything else, and pointed the whole team at making more of it. The rest of the list mostly resolved itself once there was a direction to resolve towards.

The hard part of this was never the diagnosis. It's the nerve to leave thirty visible problems alone while everyone around you points at them, which feels a lot like negligence and takes a certain bloody-mindedness to hold. Half of those problems are symptoms of the one that matters, and they clear up on their own once it does. The other half never mattered. You usually can't tell which is which in advance, so you have to be willing to look negligent for a few weeks to find out.

The deck and the committee were never really about solving the problem. They're about not being the person who took the swing and got it wrong. The instinct is understandable, and it is the whole trap.

The scarce thing was never the plan. It's knowing where to swing, and the stomach to be wrong fast.