Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Wrong Direction Problem: Why Better Execution Can Make Things Worse
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled The Wrong Direction Problem Why Better Execution Can Make Things Worse. Here we go. There's a version of failure that nobody in leadership talks about enough. Does not look like failure at all. It looks like high performance. Teams hit their numbers, processes run clean, leaders driving execution with a level of discipline that would make any operations person proud. Everything is moving fast, everyone is working hard. And the organization is moving with great precision in exactly the wrong direction. Russell Akoff said it plainly when he said The righter we do the wrong thing, the wrongger we become. Let that land for a moment. He was not talking about incompetence. He was not describing teams that are lazy, disorganized, or failing to try. He was describing something far more common and, honestly, far more dangerous. He was describing teams that are excellent at executing the wrong agenda. I've watched this play out several times at the executive level. A leadership team pours resources, talent, and urgency into a strategy. They refine it. They align to it. They hold people accountable to it, and somewhere along the way they stop asking whether the strategy itself is actually sound. The question how do we do this better quietly, completely crowds out the question should we be doing this at all? Here's what makes this so difficult to catch in the moment. Momentum feels like progress. When things are moving, when people are busy, when results are being reported, and PowerPoint decks are being built and meetings are being held. It feels wrong to slow down and question the direction. There is real social pressure inside organizations to trust the plan, to keep executing, to not disrupt the rhythm of a team that is working hard. But that pressure is exactly where leaders need to push back. Here's a common misread of Akoff's insight. People hear it and translate it as a call to slow down, to second guess everything, to stop and question before every action. That is not the point. The real insight is about sequence, specifically the sequence of wisdom at execution. Execution is a force multiplier, and force multipliers amplify whatever you point them at. If the aim is right, execution accelerates your progress. If the aim is wrong, execution accelerates your drift. And the better you get at doing the wrong thing, the further you travel from where you should be, and the harder it becomes to reverse course. This is why strategic clarity is not a nice to have. It is a leadership obligation. Before you optimize, you need to verify. Before you scale, you need to ask whether what you are scaling is actually worth scaling. And this is true in every environment, in every era. Whether you are leading a ten person team or a global organization, the fundamental question is the same. Are we chasing the right goals? Are we measuring what matters? Are we being disciplined about the right things? For those of you leading in environments where AI tools are now amplifying your team's capacity to execute, Akoff's warning carries extra weight. Because those tools can process faster, scale output further, and move with a velocity that was not possible before. And if the aim is off, you will be able to go further in the wrong direction, faster than any previous generation of leaders. The tools do not ask whether the goal is right. That responsibility has not been automated. It still belongs entirely to you. The carry forward from this is a simple discipline. Separate your operational reviews from your directional reviews. Do not just ask how well something is working. Ask, on a regular cadence, whether it should be working at all. Many leaders I've coached have built what I think of as strategic skepticism, not cynicism, not disruption for its own sake, but a genuine recurring habit of returning to the foundational question. Are we building something worth building? That kind of leadership takes real courage. Sometimes the answer requires stopping. Sometimes it requires admitting that a team's effort, no matter how excellent, was pointed somewhere it should not have gone. That's not a failure of execution, that's a failure of discernment, and the remedy is never to execute faster. Akoff gave us the warnings decades ago. The work is making it a habit today.