Things feel frantic. People are moving quickly, but deliverables aren't landing. Sprints end with more rollover. Stand-ups are tense. Arguments flare up over the right way to move forward.
Your team is burned out. Shorter tempers. More agitated. Less happy.
You're exerting energy everywhere, but it's not doing useful work. You're working longer hours, skipping breaks, rushing through lunch, eating whatever's quick. You're thinking about the problem at dinner, in bed, when you're with your family. You never turn off.
And the worst part? You're starting to feel like you have a leadership problem. Like you can't motivate people. Like no matter what you do, there's wasted energy everywhere that's not producing useful work.
Speed is increasing. Progress isn't.
The Symptom Pattern
- The team is moving fast but deliverables aren't landing.
- People depend on your availability, and you're always taking new inputs.
- Every request feels like an assignment you need to figure out and execute.
- The scope keeps growing but your team and resources don't.
This isn't a leadership problem. It's a systems problem.
Speed Without Structure
When there's no system in place to manage the influx of inputs, speed increases but progress doesn't.
You're doing a bunch of starts with no finishes because you don't have time to finish before something else pops up.
The issue is that you're treating every request as an assignment.
Someone makes a request, and you take on the responsibility of clarifying it, scoping it, and executing it.
You assume it's your job to figure out what they mean and solve their problem.
The Burden of Clarity
But the burden of clarity is on the requester, not on you.
It may seem like this is natural, but it's only natural when it's tolerated.
When you take on unclear requests without pushback, you're spending cognitive energy clarifying what they should have clarified.
You're solving problems you weren't asked to solve.
You're applying mental load to assignments that were never properly scoped.
Waste Heat
This is waste heat—energy expended that can never be recovered and produces no useful work.
In thermodynamics, waste heat is energy dissipated into the universe.
In an org, it's the hours burned translating vague intent into executable scope—the two hours spent interpreting a vague directive, the three meetings to clarify what could have been stated upfront, the mental energy spent figuring out priorities that were never established.
The team is moving fast because inputs keep coming.
Progress stalls because the system has no governance to control those inputs, and you've made yourself the release valve.
The Release Valve Problem
I saw this clearly with a client who was constantly underwater.
Every week, new priorities. Every day, new urgent requests.
Instant message pings labeled "quick question" that weren't quick.
They were moving fast, working late, and getting nowhere.
When we looked at how requests were coming in, there was no filter.
No clarity required.
Just inputs landing on their desk, and they'd immediately start figuring out what needed to happen.
The Structural Shift
They started doing one thing differently: when a request came in unclear, they sent it back to enforce clarity.
"What's the expected outcome? What's the priority? Who else needs to be involved?"
Some requests never came back.
Others came back clearer.
The ones that did come back clearer took half the time to execute because the scope was already defined.
They stopped providing timelines based on vague requests.
They made it clear: you give the scope and priority, I'll give you the timeline once I understand what you're actually asking for.
The inputs didn't stop.
But the system started managing them instead of the executive absorbing them all.
Why Teams Can’t Keep Up
When a team can't keep up with the pace, it's rarely because they're incapable or unmotivated.
It's because speed without structure produces waste heat, not progress.
When every input gets absorbed, every vague request gets clarified by the leader, and availability is treated as a virtue, the system has failed.
The issue isn't team capacity.
It's that there's no governance controlling what lands on the desk and how it lands there.
Speed increases when inputs are unfiltered. Progress happens when the system enforces clarity before execution.
