Each week I share something I notice inside leadership systems before pressure compounds.
Last week, I wrote about how pressure begins to narrow how people think and decide. The system starts to compress. Options don’t disappear, but fewer of them feel acceptable.
This week, I was reviewing a set of leadership inputs where one issue immediately dominated the conversation.
Staffing.
Everything else showed up too, like communication, time, execution, managing the team, accountability. Each one made sense on its own and were accurate descriptions of what people are experiencing.
But as the conversation continued, everything kept coming back to the same place.
Communication issues started being described as staffing.
Execution problems started getting described as staffing.
Even questions about engagement and alignment ended up there.
Nothing about the underlying issues had changed but the way they were being understood had.
Multiple problems were being absorbed into a single explanation.
That shift makes the situation easier to act on.
There’s something visible. Something concrete. Something that can be addressed.
But is that what really needs to be solved? What is at the root? If we don’t ask these questions,
Decisions stop improving the system. They start improving the explanation of the problem instead.
From that point forward, the system becomes easier to navigate, but less accurate.
The differences between issues begin to fade, because they’re no longer being separated and resolved.
It becomes harder to tell whether the issue is the problem, or just the most visible version of it.
And that’s where performance starts to drift. A budget is set. Effort increases. Activity increases.
But it’s applied against a simplified version of what’s actually happening.
The real constraints are still there but they just end up get renamed and ultimateky ignored.
Research published in Harvard Business Review has shown that as decision volume increases, decision quality often declines, mainly because they are processing more at the same time.
At a certain point, everything starts to feel important.
And when everything carries weight, the system looks for something it can organize around.
One issue becomes dominant because it gives the system something to hold onto.
That’s what makes this stage difficult to recognize.
It feels like focus but in reality, is confusion.
Estimates suggest that 60–90% of strategies fail in execution, not because the strategy is wrong, but because teams end up solving the wrong version of the problem.
In most organizations, that shows up as rework. And rework isn’t small. It often runs between 15 and 20 percent of revenue. What does that math look like in your world?
Where in your environment has one issue started to explain more than it should?
In a few cases I’ve worked with, once we slowed down just enough to separate those signals again, what looked like a single problem turned out to be something else entirely.
I read every response.
Rebekah Smith
If this resonated, share it with someone responsible for decisions under pressure.