What are you choosing not to fix?

Did you have those little sliding puzzles in your childhood? They might have come out of a Crackerjack box, or maybe a cereal box, or maybe gas stations for a road trip - I genuinely can’t remember the original source, but I remember the puzzles fondly.

It had tiles in a 4x4 grid. There were fifteen tiles with the numbers 1-15, or sometimes they had an image on it. One square was left empty so you could slide a tile into it. Then you’d slide the next tile into the now-empty square. You’d keep doing that until eventually the picture or the sequence of numbers came together - or you had to set it down because the road trip was over 🙂

Scaling a company is a lot like that puzzle.

When I’m driving transformation work with a leadership team, after a week or two I can close my eyes and see the final destination in my head. What the company will be like two years from now. The team running with clarity. The rituals producing decisions. The metrics telling you something useful before it’s too late to act. The roles drawn cleanly enough that nobody is wondering whose decision this is. Everything humming. Designed in harmony.

…then I open my eyes and come back to today. The puzzle is scrambled.

The job is to get to a completed puzzle.

But real life, like the puzzle, has constraints. You can’t lift the tiles off the board and drop them into their final positions. You might know the final vision, but you have to slide the tiles one at a time.

Why? Because humans have limited attention and limited energy. People can only absorb change so fast. And some moves have dependencies - you can’t assess company values in a performance review or interview until you know what the values are. You need metrics to drive outcomes and define effective OKRs. You can’t put a new tool in front of the team until you’ve codified the process the tool is meant to run.

Now that I’m thinking about it, that last one ties into what I described at the end of today’s intro! Some companies sense that things are chaotic, so they push for a new tool and push top-down for adoption. But if you don’t know what your process and business logic are, it’s not going to work well. The team will reject it. The new tool will cause friction. The right sequence of tiles is: devise an effective process first, then document it, then systematize it in software. You can’t jump to the end and have it be optimal.

That’s how we drive transformation: Pick the next tile. Slide it. Tell the team why that one and not the others. Then pick the next. Ad infinitum 🙂

Show the Team the Picture

When you sit down with a sliding puzzle, the end state is clear. You knew where you wanted to end up and could hold that image in your head. Some moves were guessing of course, but sometimes a move that looks pointless in isolation (“why am I moving the 7 next to the 13?”) makes complete sense when it’s part of a grand strategy.

Your team needs the picture. You’re all moving this puzzle together, but only you are defining the vision. The team needs that vision and the story of how you’re all going to get there.

If you’ve decided that the “open square” this quarter is fixing the financial model, and the next square is rebuilding the leadership rituals around what that model surfaces, and the square after that is rewriting the roles for the leaders who’ll own the numbers - then say all of that out loud! Don’t just share the move you’re making now - share the whole sequence, the dependency chain, and the reason this tile has to move before that one.

This is what good OKRs are doing, by the way. An OKR isn’t a goal list - it documents a sequence. It names the one or two tiles you’re moving this quarter and, by implication, all the tiles you’re refusing to touch.

When people understand the final picture, things stop feeling arbitrary. They feel like strategy. It is strategy.

Why “Do Everything” Feels Like the Right Answer

When you know the end state, the instinct is still to grab every tile at once and put them in place. Leaders can be impatient; if you know where you’re going, let’s get there faster.

I know this feeling well. I hate leaving problems unsolved! If I know it’s a problem, how can I just let the problem persist?! I don’t want to leave the broken thing broken for another quarter while I work on something adjacent.

Saying “we’re going to ignore the process problem for six months while we sort out metrics first” sounds like negligence. It sounds like you’re not taking the work seriously.

Doing #allthethings also looks better in a proposal to a client, or a pitch to your boss. “We’re going to redesign the org structure, install new rituals, build a financial model, and codify the operating system” reads like you’re someone who gets it.

“We’re going to fix one thing this quarter” sounds like a leader with small ambitions who is about to get sidelined.

But here’s what actually happens when you try to tackle everything:

• The time gets spread across all the elements, so each one gets a fraction of what it needs.
• The team is asked to absorb change in every direction at once, so they absorb very little.
• The connections between elements become liabilities; a half-built ritual depends on a half-built role definition, and neither one is stable.
• Everyone is busy, but there are no outcomes. Whoever funded the work can’t point to anything and say “this is different now.”
• The work gets defunded, or it limps along until somebody uses it as the cautionary tale for the next attempted transformation.

This isn’t a failure of intelligence or effort - smart people working very hard run in to brick walls all the time. It’s a failure to acknowledge constraint. The instinct was right. The sequencing wasn’t.

Picking the Open Square

The skill that matters here isn’t “knowing what’s broken.” That’s easy. Everyone can (and often may) complain 😉 The hard part is opinionated sequencing - which move, made now, unlocks the most moves later. Most people can solve a puzzle in 150 moves, but can you solve it in 40?

What’s fun about this is there isn’t a consistent path through the puzzle of business transformation! You can’t write down the path and then repeat it for every situation. It’s complex and requires judgment.

Here are a few questions I think about to figure out the moves:

How do these elements relate? Some elements are upstream of the others and should be addressed first. If you don’t know where you’re going (vision), you can’t design objectives on the path to get there. If you don’t have objectives, you can’t design metrics that matter. If you don’t have metrics, you’re running on vibes.

What’s killing the mojo? If everyone is burned out from meetings that don’t produce decisions, the “best” move on paper (e.g. fixing the process constraint) might not be the best one in practice - because the team won’t be in the right headspace. Get the mojo up first, then come back to the process.

How much capacity is there? In my world, a retainer at $10K a month buys less capacity than a retainer at $25K. Inside a company, having five people you can free up won’t get as much done as three teams of five. Acknowledging what the budget can actually move is part of the sequencing work.

None of those questions focus on “what’s most interesting to me” or “what would make the best-sounding deck.” Focus on the business’s puzzle, not personal curiosity.

A Small Engagement Is Often the Right Size

A bounded approach - one element, one quarter, one clear deliverable - isn’t a watered-down version of work. It’s often how sustainable change happens.

When a founder says “we have so many things broken, we need a big effort to fix it all,” I believe them. They’ve experienced the friction of disharmony. But they haven’t seen that the disharmony resolves through ordered, constrained moves, not through a massive parallelized effort.

The big effort is a temptation, but there aren’t a lot of shortcuts here. A small first move, taken on purpose with explicit refusal of everything else, can get you there faster.

Call to Action

Pick one problem in your business that, if you fixed it in the next 90 days, would unlock the most other things downstream of it. Just one.

Then write down the things you are choosing not to engage for those 90 days, and the reason. Are you uncomfortable thinking of problems you’re not going to address? 🤣 Being uncomfortable isn’t a guarantee that you’re on the right track, but it’s a sign you’re making real tradeoffs.

If you want to go further: share the “out of scope” list with your team in an upcoming all hands, alongside the vision of where you’re going. This will rally the team. The act of naming what you’re refusing to do gives the team permission to ignore them and finish the thing you are doing.

As always, I’d love to hear what you picked - and more interesting to me, what you decided not to do. Email me at kevin@catalyst.group18.co.

Kevin