What’s Slowing Execution Down?
Why accelerating execution may have more to do with removing friction than increasing effort
The priorities are clear.
People understand what matters.
Teams know what they’re trying to accomplish before year-end.
And yet somehow, the work still isn’t moving.
Decisions take longer than they should. Meetings multiply. Work gets caught between teams. Approvals pile up. People wait for someone else to make the call.
When this happens, the natural response is often predictable:
Move faster. Push harder. Create more urgency.
But what if people are already moving as fast as the organization lets them?
Maybe the better question isn’t:
Why aren’t people moving faster?
Maybe it’s:
What is making it unnecessarily difficult for people to get important work done?
Because execution doesn’t always need more pressure.
Sometimes it needs less friction.
Organizations Accumulate Friction
Very few organizations intentionally design work to be difficult.
Friction tends to accumulate over time.
After something goes wrong, they add a new approval gets added.
A recurring meeting is created to improve coordination.
A report is introduced because someone needs greater visibility.
Another team gets added to a decision because their input might be important.
Individually, each decision can make sense.
Collectively, they can create an organization where getting something done requires navigating layers of processes, meetings, approvals, handoffs and competing expectations.
Eventually, people start spending almost as much energy navigating the organization as they do doing the work. When execution slows, we often respond by asking people to work harder within the same system.
But effort and execution aren’t the same thing.
Sometimes people aren’t the bottleneck. The organization is.
What's Slowing Execution Down - Clear the Path
If leaders want execution to move faster, one of their most important responsibilities may be removing what slows it down.
A simple place to start is:
DECIDE → SIMPLIFY → CLEAR
DECIDE: Who Can Make the Call?
Think about an important initiative that isn’t moving as quickly as it should.
Is the team actually doing the work?
Or are they waiting for a decision?
Unclear decision rights create enormous friction.
People aren’t sure who has authority. Decisions get escalated unnecessarily. Multiple leaders weigh in. Teams revisit decisions that have already been made.
Eventually, even relatively small decisions start travelling up the organization.
Ask:
What decisions are taking longer than they should, and why?
Not every decision needs to move faster. Some deserve careful consideration.
But many organizations could dramatically improve execution by making it clearer who decides what.
Speed often improves when ownership is clearer.
SIMPLIFY: What Doesn’t Need to Be This Complicated?
Organizations rarely set out to create bureaucracy.
They accumulate it.
Processes get another step. Meetings gain more attendees. Reports gain another section. Approval chains gain another reviewer.
Eventually, nobody quite remembers why some of it exists.
So take an important piece of work and ask:
If we designed this process today, would we design it this way?
Which steps genuinely create value?
Which controls genuinely manage risk?
Which meetings genuinely improve coordination?
And which exist primarily because that’s how we’ve always done it?
Simplification doesn’t mean removing every process or control.
It means being deliberate about what the work actually requires.
Complexity accumulates quietly. Simplification has to happen deliberately.
CLEAR: What Obstacle Can Leadership Remove?
One of the simplest questions a leader can ask a team is:
What’s getting in your way?
And then listen carefully to the answer.
Maybe another team hasn’t delivered something they need.
Maybe priorities are competing.
Maybe an executive decision hasn’t been made.
Maybe people lack the resources, information or authority they need.
Some obstacles need to be worked through some obstacles.
Others exist precisely because they require leadership intervention.
That’s an important distinction.
Leaders shouldn’t solve every problem for their teams.
But they should focus on the obstacles only they can remove.
A useful leadership discipline might be surprisingly simple:
Every week, remove one obstacle preventing an important priority from moving forward.
Over time, that can create more execution capacity than another meeting asking why things aren’t moving faster.
Try the Friction Test
Choose one of your most important priorities between now and year-end.
Then talk to the people closest to the work and ask three questions:
What decision are you waiting for?
What process is making this harder than it needs to be?
What obstacle could leadership remove that would help you move faster?
You may learn more about your organization’s ability to execute from those three questions than from another project status report.
Because the people closest to the work usually know where the friction is.
The question is whether anyone is asking them.
Speed Without Chaos
There is an important caution here.
Removing friction doesn’t mean removing governance.
Not every approval is bureaucracy. Not every process is unnecessary. Not every decision should be pushed down the organization.
Controls exist for good reasons: managing risk, protecting customers, ensuring quality, meeting regulatory requirements and coordinating complex work.
The goal isn’t simply less process.
It’s the right amount of process for the work.
Good organizational design should make important work easier to accomplish without making important risks harder to manage.
That’s the balance.
Before You Ask People to Move Faster
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been working through a simple progression for Q4 execution.
First:
What actually matters now?
Then:
Does everyone know what winning looks like?
Now there’s another question:
What’s getting in the way?
Once leaders set priorities and people understand how their work contributes, leadership has another responsibility.
Make it possible for people to execute.
So before asking your people to work harder, move faster or push through another obstacle, ask:
What is making it unnecessarily difficult for people to get important work done?
Then:
DECIDE → SIMPLIFY → CLEAR
Clarify who can make the decision.
Simplify what doesn’t need to be complicated.
Clear the obstacles only leadership can remove.
Because sometimes the fastest way to accelerate execution isn’t to push harder.
It’s to clear the path.
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