When I walk into an organization that’s struggling with change or performance, the first place I look is the executive team. More often than not, the people at the top haven’t agreed on which projects matter most, and everyone downstream pays for it.
Here’s what that looks like day to day. Teams work hard to make a process more efficient when that process could potentially be eliminated entirely. Departments chase ten separate problems without realizing that two root causes are driving all ten. People stay late, burn through budget, and still feel like nothing moves. I call these scattered cultures, and they’re far more common than most leaders truly understand and want to admit.
Misalignment Wears People Down
Think about the tires on your car. When they’re out of alignment, they wear out faster and the ride gets less safe and more expensive. Organizations work the same way. When leaders aren’t pulling toward a common need for the business, energy leaks out in every direction, good people get exhausted, and the company takes on risk it doesn’t need.
The fix starts with a question every executive team should answer the same way: which few projects matter most to our customers and stakeholders right now?
A Hundred Projects and No Charters
I once worked with a large Philadelphia facility run by one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world, and it had roughly 100 projects underway. I asked to see the charter for each one, and there weren’t any. When I asked where the projects came from, the honest answer was that people had simply dreamed them up.
None of those projects were finishing on time, and the people running them were overwhelmed. So we held a one-week Kaizen event. We put every project on the wall and interrogated each one, asking what would happen if we killed it. It’s a kind of reverse failure mode and effects analysis, and in many cases the answer was nothing at all. We asked who actually read the reports those projects produced, and we found redundancy everywhere.
By the end of the week, we’d killed half of them. You could feel the relief in the room, and the projects that survived finally had the time and attention to get done. We also built a screening filter that week, so any new project idea had to prove it was worth the investment before it was chartered by an executive sponsor and anyone started on it. That filter hadn’t existed before, which is exactly how they ended up with 100 projects.
Root Cause Beats Busywork
The second mistake I see right alongside misalignment is skipping root cause. When leaders treat every symptom as its own project, they multiply the work. When they dig down to the handful of causes producing those symptoms, two well-chosen projects can clear up ten problems.
That’s where alignment and root cause analysis work together. An aligned leadership team agrees on what the customer values and the end-to-end value stream with specific Lean measures. Root cause analysis then shows them where the real problems live. With both in place, you stop spreading your people thin across work that doesn’t move the business.
Where to Start
If your team feels busy but stuck, get your executives in a room and put every active project on the wall. Ask which ones directly serve what your customers are paying you for, and ask what would happen if you stopped the rest. You may be surprised how much capacity is hiding in work nobody needs.
Ready to take the next step?
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