Eric Kebschull

Let's begin today with a story ... one that starts with the review of the company's financial progress: The quarterly review opens the way it always does. Revenue is up, membership is up, and output up. The dashboard reads green across the board, allowing the executive team takes a sigh of relief. Now fast forward a year, that same team is staring at a cliff. Revenue is down, as is membership and output. Their claim: nobody saw this coming! Thus, the post-mortems begin. What went wrong?...

Most of us are trained to be decisive. After all, the market rewards speed, our boards reward action, and our colleagues reward confidence. So when a problem surfaces, the expectation is to do something about it ... and fast! It should be no suprise how many of us got here, as it is what much of our schooling in the United States rewarded: decision making from the indivdual to the bubbleed-in answer on the scantron. No time for collective problem solving (if that's even allowed), and no...

There is a particular kind of relief that fills a room when a hard problem gets declared resolved. The task force submits its report. The strategy deck lands in everyone's inbox. The offsite produces a one-pager with three clear priorities and a timeline. Everyone exhales. The leader looks capable. The organization moves on. And six months later, the same problem is back on the agenda. This is not a story about incompetence. It is a story about the deep human preference for tidiness, and how...