1. When Effort Becomes a Liability
Effort turns into a liability when three things occur together:
the environment changes -The original logic that justified existing structures no longer fully applies: Regulation tightens; Customers behave differently; Capital expectations shift; Leadership changes.
the organisation responds by adding activity -New controls, new initiatives, new layers of review — all designed to protect what already exists.
decision-making is deferred -Rather than revisiting first principles, effort is used to stabilise discomfort. The organisation works harder so it doesn’t have to change course.
At this point, effort is no longer in service of direction, and is instead, in service of continuity.
Why this persists in capable organisations
This pattern is most common in competent organisations, not in failing ones.
Capable people know how to respond to pressure. They optimise, refine, and push through. That is how they earned responsibility in the first place.
The problem is that optimisation is a second-order skill. It assumes the first-order question has already been settled.
When the first-order questions change — What business are we really in now? What risk actually matters? What must be decided rather than managed? — optimisation becomes a distraction.
The organisation looks functional, while in reality it becomes less coherent.
The hidden cost
The cost of misaligned effort is rarely immediate, and shows up later as:
decisions that feel increasingly constrained
reputational or regulatory exposure that appears sudden but wasn’t
fatigue among senior leaders who are working hard but not feeling effective
a sense that “we’re doing everything right, but it’s still not working”
By the time this is recognised, optionality has already narrowed. This isn’t because people didn’t try. They did. The optionality narrows because people tried to preserve momentum instead of revisiting direction.
The harder move
The corrective action at this point is not more effort. It is not better execution.
The better action is stopping — briefly, deliberately — to re-establish clarity.
That means asking questions that interrupt activity:
which assumptions are we still operating under that no longer hold?
what work continues because it is familiar, not because it is necessary?
what decision has been deferred by keeping everyone busy?
if we were starting from today’s conditions, what would we not build this way?
These questions feel destabilising precisely because they threaten effort already invested. But without them, effort continues to accumulate cost.
Clarity before activity
Clarity does not mean certainty. It is coherence — a shared understanding of what matters now and why.
When clarity is restored, effort becomes useful again. Some work stops. Some work sharpens. Some work is delayed.
And occasionally, the most responsible act is to abandon work that no longer serves its original purpose.
This is not failure. It is judgment.
A final distinction
Effort is admirable.
Discipline is valuable.
Resilience is necessary.
But none of them substitute for clarity.
At certain points in an organisation’s life, the most consequential contribution is not doing more — it is deciding differently. And that decision is easiest to make before effort hardens into obligation that no longer serves its purpose.