🗑️ 5.9.2025 - Work that doesn't work Part 2

Why your team is doing more but getting less done - and how to break out of that

In this Issue

🔄 Leadership Perspective: Busy ≠ Productive
Despite being overloaded with initiatives, many organizations underperform because effort is spent on low-value, misaligned, or inefficient work, not due to lack of effort or investment.

• 🧭 Misplaced Decision-Making
  Key insights and better paths are often missed because decisions are made too far from the front lines—real progress requires proximity between decision-making and expertise.
• ⛓️ Gatekeepers & Bloat Kill Momentum
  Layers of gatekeeping, outdated processes, and too many "non-doers" create costly bottlenecks—draining energy, delaying progress, and eroding morale.
• 🎯 Right Talent, Right Task
  Lack of traction often stems from misalignment between task complexity and workforce capability—scaling wins requires empowering skilled "doers" and cutting unproductive overhead.
• 📉 Shrink the Work to Win More
  Organizations that break oversized projects into smaller, high-impact, well-staffed efforts achieve more wins per fiscal year—and stay agile enough to capture emerging opportunities.

💸 Macro finance insights: What to get ready for

• 🌍📉 Global financial shift underway: As US economic indicators weaken (GDP down 0.3%, air travel demand slipping), institutions are turning to "blue chip" crypto like Bitcoin (now >$100K) and nations are seeking alternatives to the US dollar in trade.
• 🏛️💱 Changing guard in global finance: Historical parallels suggest US tariff strategies may backfire, while rising institutional crypto interest and de-dollarization in Asia signal a broader architectural evolution in the world economy.

[perspective]

Work that Doesn't Work Part 2

The New Productivity Paradox: Why So Much Work Produces So Little Value

Why we don't do what we could do, even though we really really could do it

The phrase Productivity Paradox was originally coined by Erik Brynjolfsson in 1993 - referring to an ironic decline in productivity growth in spite of the emergence of information technology. Today we're seeing a new version of that issue, where companies don't achieve their goals in spite of stated intent, and in spite of plenty investments in technology and staffing.

Leading companies are learning how to unlock new wins and successes by getting a clear understanding this issue, and how to address it.

Too Many Things, Not Enough Progress

Companies today are busier than ever—but not necessarily more effective. Despite significant investments in technology, talent, and transformation initiatives, many are missing their goals.

Leaders hear it and say it constantly: We’re trying to do too many things—we need to prioritize! At the same time, we get a steady stream of signals from customers and the competition that - guess what - We’re not doing nearly enough. We’re falling behind competitors, failing to meet customer expectations, struggling to upskill our teams, and not building the resilience we need.

So which is it? Are we overloaded, or are we underperforming?

The answer isn’t about cutting back or doing more. It’s not that people aren’t working hard. It’s about how work gets done. Sometimes, the problem isn’t what we’re asking people to do—it’s how we arrived at the current set of priorities and how we expect them to do it. When we presume that work can only get done with a certain structure or team size or set of specific roles, we limit our impact.

Companies fall into this trap all the time. Consider the ways we bog ourselves down:

• Missing important cues and opportunities because decisions are happening at the wrong levels or wrong locations in the organization. Relevant high value insights that would have taken us down a better path were available but missed because we weren't hearing from people with direct line of sight into the actual problems.
• Gatekeeper teams that create bottlenecks instead of progress because they are shielded from accountability. While other teams directly feel the consequences of success or failure, these teams do not.
• Redundant or non-effective processes. This can include roles or frameworks that were imposed because they seemed to be "correct" but weren't actually applied to the way your industry needs to work.

All of these have one pernicious thing in common - they consume effort, attention, energy and good will without offering much good in return. They exhaust teams and partners and give everyone a superficially inflated perception of the level of effort required. It causes us to falsely conclude that the impact we want to have is beyond our ability.

No wonder so many teams feel overloaded and swamped.

Perception vs Reality

The reality: People are rarely overloaded with truly vital tasks—they’re overloaded with forced inefficiencies that waste their time and energy - and make us lose sight of the more important work. Like raindrops on a windshield that - if we focus on them - make us lose sight of the road to our destination.

• Workers report spending 41% of their time in low value tasks, per this Workforce Lab study.
• This inability to focus on high value work is expensive - This Economist Impact study found $1.4 Trillion in lost economic opportunity in the US alone.

The graphic below illustrates why perceptions and realities about work can differ.

Project sizing, when done by individuals or teams unfamiliar with the subject matter or expertise domain, tends to be based on fear of underestimating the effort This tends tend to result in estimates that are inflated.

Beyond just sizing and estimating, the projects themselves (their budgets, staffing needs and timelines) become larger when we don't have the optimal talent working on them.

If you see chronic worker overload and budget overruns even though the company is lagging on its goals and KPIs, its an expression of the fact that we don't know how to match the work with the talent required to do it optimally. We aren't selecting the right talent for the initiatives we take on. Or perhaps we do have a few individuals with the expertise and talent, but we aren't letting them use their expertise to guide us toward more optimal ways of working. Either way, it puts teams in a no win situation - doing more and more but getting less and less done.

Doing more but getting less done - why it happens

As shown in the graphic below, this impacts how many wins we can create in a given Fiscal Year. The Fiscal Years of most companies look like the one on the left (FY1): large oversized initiatives that spill over across multiple years and prevent other essential modernizations or improvements from happening. Leading companies learn how to have Fiscal Years that look more like the one on the right (FY3). Required work is done via smaller tighter efforts with the right talent, which leaves margin for unforeseen opportunities.

...And how to break out of the cycle

The above graphic shows the implications of incorrectly sized work. FY 1 represents a company that takes on fewer initiatives than they could/should simply because their workforce lacks the talent to size and execute the work. It is perceived to be larger than it actually is.

As the progress reports flow in, the (actually false) perception is reinforced, until everyone accepts that the projects will have to spill over into next year. Which means that we'll have reduced ability to respond to the unique customer needs and competitive threats that will emerge next year.

Key point: We don’t just need fewer priorities—we need better traction.

Strategies for better enterprise traction

• Eliminate unnecessary process overhead—streamlining work so that the important stuff actually gets done, while the other less important / optional stuff gets deferred, or better yet, completely and permanently removed from people's plates.
• Put decision-making in closer proximity to expertise —ensuring decisions are made by those with the clearest line of sight on the problem. For additional insights see the recent S3T Edition on Avoiding the Horse Shoe Trap
• Reducing delays - cutting out loops that force people to wait on gatekeeper or approver types who aren't providing meaningful or timely scrutiny. Watch out for approval bodies where the approvers aren't keeping up with the rapidly evolving subject area they are responsible for - where those seeking approval have to educate and upskill the people with approval authority. Some of this is inevitable - we all have things we don't know. But if it's consistent, consider changing that approval process so it is done by more informed knowledgeable approvers.
• Check the composition of your workforce: Doers vs. Non-Doers. In most organizations, the ratio of “doers” to “non-doers” is incompatible with stated goals. Too many roles are built around observing, reporting, and deliberating—and too few around actually building, creating, and solving. Ask yourself: How many of our team members are moving things from zero to one? Building the product, closing the deal, shipping the solution? Vs. how many are just making slides to report that we're still at zero?
• Upskill the Doers - Make sure those who are building, solving and moving the team forward are equipped and empowered to play at the top of their game. You'll get way more done.

If it feels like your team is both doing too much and not achieving enough, take a hard look at how work is flowing. Your organization isn’t underperforming because people are doing too little. It’s underperforming because too few are enabled to do what matters most.

So by taking these points and applying them, you and your team can join those leading organizations that are learning how to unlock new wins and successes by getting a clear understanding of the productivity paradox, fine tune the composition of their workforce, and optimize their processes so their teams can focus on the high value work and deliver that greater level of impact that we all want to deliver.

[macro-economics]

Economic evolution driven by shift to alternative assets and currencies

Full Access Members: See the S3T Economic Dashboard for the Top 500+ US & International real-time economic indicators.

Interest Rates & Economic Risks

Amid protest from the White House, the Fed held Interest Rates unchanged at 4.50% this week. US Productivity declined in Q1 2025 and GDP fell 0.3% per the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (next update May 29).

Airfares

I travel a bit, and noticed air travel seemed down. Latest data indicates this is not just my imagination - demand for domestic travel is weakening and airfares are dropping. Maybe a good time for that trip you were thinking about?

Dollar as Reserve Currency

Harold James shares the historical precedents for the US's current tariff strategy, reminding us of 2 other similar attempts:

• Nixon's 1971 Smithsonian Agreement
• Reagan's 1985 Plaza Accord

Neither provided any long term relief to US workers. And James shows how the current efforts could backfire. More countries are looking for ways to avoid using the US dollar in trade. The shift seems especially pronounced in Asia.

Bitcoin back above $100K

Bitcoin was at 102K at time of writing, due to institutional interest perhaps stoked by the announcement of a US-UK trade agreement. Other leading digital assets also rose higher this week, but Bitcoin dominance (the % of crypto investors holding Bitcoin vs others is >60% ...this is different from the other two 100K price peaks, and suggests tapering interest in the so-called "Alt-coins", the longer tail of lesser known-lesser held digital assets.

This combined with the other current indicators noted here suggests 2 shifts underway:

• More and more crypto is becoming the domain of serious (institutional) investors looking for "blue chip" crypto assets rather than fun meme coins because they sense that the current go to havens and assets offered by the current US led global financial system might not be as viable in the future.
• Likewise international trade partners are exploring alternatives to the US dollar based global trading system.

The financial architecture of the world is changing.

[S3T playbooks]

• Spend Wisely in a Hype-Driven World
• Gaining Buy-in for Data Modernization
• Flipping the Script: Understanding and Changing Internal & Macro Narratives
• Shift to effective gatekeeping in the age of generative AI
• How to Stop Zombie Projects from Sapping your Focus and Resources
• Harmonize Different Kinds of Expertise to Achieve Success
• Addressing issues related to uneven accountability
• Validating AI use cases
• 6 Proven Ways to Resolve Conflicts

See Full List of S3T Playbooks

Opinions expressed are those of the individuals and do not reflect the official positions of companies or organizations those individuals may be affiliated with. Not financial, investment or legal advice, and no offers for securities or investment opportunities are intended. Mentions should not be construed as endorsements. Authors or guests may hold assets discussed or may have interests in companies mentioned.