"Your job is meant to support your life. Issue #03 | May 2026 |
|
This Week's Hook The Wile E. Coyote Strategy: Why Your Company's Grand Plan Is About to Hit a Cliff
© Warner Bros. Used for editorial and educational purposes. Have you ever sat in a strategy meeting, looked around the room at very serious people in very expensive chairs, and thought... we are absolutely about to run off this cliff? Congratulations. You've just experienced the Wile E. Coyote Effect. Here's what people forget about Wile E.: he is not sitting on a rock doing nothing. The man works. He researches. He engineers. He submits purchase orders to the Acme Corporation with what I can only assume is an extraordinarily detailed business case, complete with ROI projections and a 90 day implementation timeline. He is overqualified, overengineered, and permanently unsuccessful. The tragedy isn't the failure. It's that he clearly has the capability, and refuses to use it simply. He could sit quietly beside the road with a net and some patience and probably catch the Road Runner by Tuesday. Instead, he straps himself to a rocket because this time, complexity is the answer. That hits very differently after your third failed transformation initiative. "We overcomplicate the work. We buy the tool instead of fixing the system. And we don't work on behaviors." The Real Talk The Acme Problem.Swap "Acme Corporation" for your last software implementation. Your new engagement survey platform. That leadership development program nobody finished. The consultant your organization hired to tell you what your own employees had been saying for two years. The budget was real. The intentions were real. The splat was also very real. Many workplaces have developed what I call Acme Dependency, the institutional belief that the right product, platform, or program will solve a problem that is fundamentally human, cultural, or structural. It goes like this: Step 1: Identify a problem. Step 2: Buy something. Step 3: Announce the initiative. Step 4: Move to the next problem before Step 3 actually works. Step 5: Wonder why nothing ever sticks. Performance management is the perfect example. Organizations spend enormous time and money engineering the most complex, multi tiered, beautifully branded performance systems imaginable. Nine box grids. Competency frameworks. Calibration sessions with color coded dashboards. And none of it means anything if managers aren't being held accountable for having even the most basic performance discussions with their people. You can't buy your way out of a behavior problem. The same is true for engagement surveys. The fanciest, most statistically sophisticated survey on the market becomes worthless the moment leadership isn't prepared to do anything about what it finds. Employees stop answering honestly. Then leadership wonders why scores look flat. You didn't have a data problem. You had a courage problem. The Hot Take Activity Is Not the Same as Progress.Road Runner isn't doing anything special. He doesn't have a war room. He's just moving, consistently, without a quarterly planning offsite. Meanwhile, Wile E. is up to his ears in blueprints, spreadsheets, and vendor contracts. He is the embodiment of activity mistaken for progress. He is every task force that produces a report instead of a result. He is every reorg that shuffles the boxes on the org chart without changing a single decision making dynamic. Wile E. is not dumb. In many episodes he's explicitly labeled a genius. He has access to infinite resources. He has motivation. What he doesn't have is the discipline to choose simple over sophisticated. A simple solution doesn't feel like enough. It doesn't signal seriousness. It doesn't justify the budget. It doesn't give him something to present. "He is every manager who mistakes busyness for leadership, and every organization that rewards the presentation of effort over the delivery of outcomes." Straight-Talk Insight Three Questions to Ask Before Your Next Initiative.Before your next planning cycle. Before your next tool purchase. Before your next transformational initiative gets its own logo and launch event, ask yourself these honestly: 1. Are we solving the actual problem, or just making the problem more expensive? A complicated solution is not a better solution. It is just a more dramatic way to hit the canyon floor. Get ruthlessly clear on the root cause, not the symptom. Then ask: is what we're about to buy actually solving that? 2. Could a stick and some patience get us there? Not everything needs a rocket. Some of the best talent retention programs I have ever seen were not programs at all. They were managers who actually knew their people and cared about their growth. No software required. 3. What are we actually chasing? Sometimes the goal itself has become a performance. We don't actually want to catch the Road Runner anymore. We just want the launch event. We want the announcement. We want the credit for starting something, even if we have no real intention of seeing it through. Honest organizations ask this question and answer it honestly. You don't need a bigger rocket. You need a better question. Before you place that next order with Acme, ask yourself: what would actually work? And then have the courage to do that thing, even if it's simpler than the plan, and even if nobody else in the room thinks it's impressive enough. Beep beep. |
|
MY FRIEND IN HR "Your job is meant to support your life. Your life isn't meant to support your job." |