When organisations are under pressure, something predictable happens: they hunker down, make decisions based on urgency rather than importance, and often miss the leverage points that could actually shift things.
This is completely understandable. When you're in survival mode, strategic thinking feels like a luxury you can't afford.
The tunnelling effect
Pressure creates tunnelling. Your attention gets captured by what's most urgent, which means you stop seeing options. You make short-term decisions that sometimes make the long-term situation worse. The fires you're fighting today often turn out to be symptoms of something you haven't had time to look at.
It's not a failure of leadership or capability. It's how human attention works under stress.
The juggling problem
When you're juggling too many balls, the instinct is to juggle harder or faster. But that's rarely the answer.
What actually helps is figuring out which balls you can safely set down, which ones genuinely need to stay in the air, and what's making the juggling harder than it needs to be. Sometimes it's the system itself—the hand-offs, the decision-making processes, the way information flows—that's creating unnecessary difficulty.
Finding the leverage points
For long-term solutions, yes—pause, review everything, think strategically. But in the short term, don't wait for the organisation to roll out another transformation project.
Ask yourself: What's one specific thing making everything else harder? And what's the smallest intervention that might actually shift it?