I first saw a particular kind of organisational dysfunction that looks, from the outside, like productivity.
People are at their desks. Emails are being answered. Status updates are being filed. If you walked through the office or scrolled through the project management tool, you would see motion everywhere. You would probably leave satisfied that the function was operating as intended.
It wasn’t. It was spinning.
I have seen this pattern more than once across my career, but the version I encountered in Q1 2022 was the clearest example I have ever had to diagnose and fix. Twelve people. Defined roles. A roadmap that existed as a document. And almost no meaningful forward movement. The organisation had confused activity with execution, and nobody, including the people inside it, could quite articulate why things were not progressing.
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The Situation
When I inherited that function, my first instinct was that prioritisation was the problem. Too many things on the list, not enough forcing function to separate what matters from what merely feels urgent.
I was wrong. Completely, and in a way that cost me several weeks before I understood it.
The roadmap was not too long. The roles were not unclear. The team was not under-resourced. What they were was uninformed, not about their tasks, but about the reasoning behind the decisions being made above and around them. They were executing in a context vacuum. So they did what reasonable, conscientious professionals do in that situation: they slowed down. They checked before moving. They escalated questions that should have been within their authority to resolve. They waited for signals that it was safe to proceed.
From the outside, this looked like a motivation problem, or possibly a talent problem. It was neither. It was an information architecture problem. The organisation had been accidentally withholding the one input that would have unlocked movement: the reasoning behind the decisions they were being asked to implement.
I sat with that for longer than I am proud of. The answer, when it eventually became obvious, was almost embarrassingly simple.
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The Analysis
**The “why” is not context. It is infrastructure.**
Most organisations treat explanation as a courtesy, something you offer when you have time, or when someone asks. A communication style preference of a particular manager. Optional, in other words.
That framing is wrong. When people understand why a decision was made, they gain the ability to make hundreds of downstream decisions correctly, without requiring escalation at every step. They know the intent. They can infer the direction. They can course-correct in real time when circumstances shift, because they understand what they are trying to achieve, not just what they have been told to do.
Withholding that reasoning does not protect decision-making authority. It undermines execution quality at every level below the decision-maker. The bottleneck most organisations search for, in their processes, their tooling, their structures, often sits inside this gap: information asymmetry between those who set direction and those who carry it out.
**Clarity before implementation, not after, changes everything.**
The change we made was not structural. We did not redesign the function or rewrite the roadmap. We introduced one practice: before any significant decision was implemented, we held a ten-minute conversation to explain the reasoning, and we explicitly asked what was wrong with it.
Not a memo. Not a Slack message. A conversation, before the fact, with an invitation for challenge.
The effect was not that people agreed with everything. Some of the pushback was genuinely useful and changed how we proceeded. But the more important effect was that people stopped operating in a state of ambient uncertainty. They knew the thinking. They trusted the direction was considered. And they could move.
Execution pace shifted meaningfully within six weeks. The strategy had not changed. The team had not changed. The information available to the team had.
**The invitation to challenge is not a vulnerability. It is a signal.**
This is the part senior leaders often resist. Asking “What is wrong with this thinking?” feels, if you are not careful, like an admission that you are unsure, and there is a version of leadership culture that treats uncertainty as weakness.
That instinct is expensive. In practice, the invitation to challenge a decision before implementation does two things simultaneously: it surfaces the genuine blind spots that the person closest to execution can see, and it signals to the team that their judgment is trusted enough to be heard. Both of these outcomes improve execution quality. Neither of them undermines authority.
The executives I have worked with who moved the fastest were not the ones who decided fastest. They were the ones whose teams needed to ask the fewest clarifying questions, because the direction was clear, the reasoning was shared, and people had been given permission, implicitly, to use their own judgment within that frame.
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The Implication
If your team is busy and results are not moving, resist the temptation to reach for structural solutions first. Before you reorganise, reprioritise, or replace anyone, ask a simpler question: do the people executing our strategy understand why the key decisions were made?
Not what was decided. Why.
If the honest answer is that you are not sure, or that the reasoning lives only in a few senior heads and has never been made explicit, then you have found your bottleneck. It is not a talent problem. It is not a resource problem. It is a context problem, and context is one of the few things in organisational life that is both genuinely free and genuinely powerful.
The teams I have seen operate with real speed and confidence share one quality: they are trusted with the reasoning, not just the instruction. That trust does not slow decisions down. It distributes the capacity to make them well.
Context is not what you give people after they ask for it. It is what you owe them before they need to.