You walk into your apartment and find it a mess. What do you do? You roll up your sleeves and put it in order. That’s the instinct, and it’s not a bad one — bringing order to chaos feels manageable, logical, rational. The alternative is standing there confused, unsure which pile to tackle first, unsure if you’re even solving the right problem.
Leaders do exactly this when a business situation turns messy and nonlinear. They reach for whatever tools have worked before. If you’re a numbers person, you build a model — spreadsheets, pivot tables, projections — and use it to make the call. Say the model says: push for more sales. You send that mandate down to the salesforce, expecting them to jumpstart their engines and land some big-ticket wins.
Here’s the problem. It’s August. Most of your clientele is on vacation. Building a new pipeline this month is close to impossible — next month, sure, but that doesn’t help this quarter’s projections. The numbers come in far short, not because the salesforce didn’t try, but because the plan was never aligned with the actual calendar they were operating inside.
Would consulting the head of sales first have changed anything? Almost certainly. But that’s not where the leader started. Before doing any of that, the instinct was to get a grip on the situation using the tools already trusted — the ones that had worked before, in other quarters, on other problems.
Underneath that instinct sits something more specific than habit. It’s political math. A leader who consults the salesforce first, adjusts the plan, and still comes up short has to explain a judgment call gone wrong — an off-script decision that didn’t pan out. A leader who runs the numbers, builds the model, and communicates the projection clearly has a much easier story to tell the board when the quarter misses: the clientele was off-season, the numbers reflect that, here’s the data. Failing with a spreadsheet in hand is simply more survivable than failing without one, even when the spreadsheet was wrong from the start.
None of this means the answer is to throw the plan out entirely and stay perpetually flexible. Indecision dressed up as openness is its own trap — chasing whatever seems interesting in the moment, with no anchor to an actual objective, wastes just as much energy as a rigid, wrong plan ever did.
The real skill is staying uncomfortable a little longer before locking anything in — willing to get your hands dirty, gather what the ground is actually telling you, and let order arrive a beat later than instinct wants it to. Not indecision. Just a longer runway before conviction sets in.