The #1 Roadblock Stopping Organizational Breakthroughs (And How to Remove It)

By Dr. Michael E Nagel

Organizational breakthroughs by their very nature are elusive. The pathway to them is veiled, hard to see across cloudy unfamiliar territory. The terrain is daunting. Breakthroughs test leadership teams, requiring them to achieve something they don't currently know how to do.

To make matters worse, many obstacles present themselves on the way to attaining organizational breakthroughs. Some of the barriers that interfere with breakthrough pursuits include:

• Lack of clarity on what (and why) we are trying to achieve together
• Low breakthrough intelligence
• Multifaceted resistance to change
• Ineffective communication
• Scarcity of the right talent
• Inability to tap a collective's ingenuity
• Misalignment in the coordination of effort
• Team behavioral dynamics
• Insufficient discipline and accountability

Each of these challenges (and others) has been cited, researched and written about. But one barrier, often trivialized in practice, obstructs most. Without intentional focus, it can slow or even stop the flow of breakthrough progress.

The #1 Roadblock

What does it mean to be the number one roadblock? Three things. First the roadblock is practical — it is tangible and generally immediately actionable. Second it rises to the top because its occurrence is common in virtually all organizations and teams. Finally, it's often the most important to address. Attending to it is highly beneficial for activating a breakthrough future.

Holding on is about maintaining, continuing and protecting. Holding on is an under-the-radar passive decision, but a decision nonetheless. Releasing is about letting go, eliminating, unplugging, discontinuing, stopping, saying no. Releasing is a learned behavior. It's an intentional discipline.

Holding on has an enormous cost. It will stifle a team's hope for a breakthrough. It distracts focus, consumes scarce resources and makes it difficult to bring forth the sustained ingenuity required to manifest new winning realities. When viewed through the lens of their desired future, most organizations and teams are steeped in things that should no longer exist. Holding on tightly will sacrifice a preferred future. Releasing can often tilt the odds of success in a team's favor.

I have never seen a leadership team or an organization be naturally good at proactively releasing. Most hold on. Many avoid or delay the conversations that enable teams to let go of lesser things. Or at best, teams passively tinker with it, stopping trivial things to achieve a few easy early wins.

This is not a new observation. In 1906 economist Vilfredo Pareto introduced his 80-20 principle, observing that 80% of outcomes tend to come from 20% of their causes (the vital few). [1] This insight suggests that for most breakthrough campaigns there is an unequal relationship between the results we achieve and the variety of activities that contribute to them. Some things we give energy to have a far greater impact on our results than others.

In 1996 Michael Porter wrote, "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do." [2] But in practice, strategizing attention on most teams is way over indexed on choosing and resourcing what to do. Most organizations do strategy as if it's an additive campaign.

How much time, energy and budget are locked up in holding on, that could be redistributed to fuel your breakthrough future? Why do organizations too often continue holding on to the many activities that are being done but are contributing least?

Organizational Stages

Holding on occurs at every stage of an organization's development. Throughout its lifecycle, letting go is essential to unlock what's next. But as organizations develop and grow, a powerful new dynamic settles in that was not apparent earlier.

Early in their existence, organizations are trying to craft and prove their business model to secure customers. The mode and culture is entrepreneurial and market-oriented. Staying focused by saying no (often more than letting go) is a key capability.

As an organization develops, its prospects for survival improve. Stacking customer wins and building operations to enable scale takes precedent. Depending on its future vision and market prospects, saying no and letting go both hold real power to fuel continuing progress.

But by the time organizations become more mature and established, considerable energy is being given to protection. Mature organizations seek to protect market gains by institutionalizing operational ways. The mode and culture is often described as conservative, predictable and smooth. Sophistication in planning, structures and process-centric roles has emerged — based on historical ways of meeting market needs.

Mature organizations are still ambitious. The pace is fast and the work to be done is enormous. But unlike earlier points in their history, the collective energy has become diffused between growing and protecting. A senior leader from a high-growth organization newly in the mature stage explained: "We don't stop things. Things just get added on. Everything is a priority."

Inevitably, organizations face times when the ability — or inability — to let go is catalytic in whether organizational renewal (a breakthrough) or decline happens.

Releasing — A Case Example

Earlier in my career I engaged a brand-name privately held international company in the mature stage. The organization was performing, but this performance had more to do with the strength and global resonance of its brand. The company lacked robust prioritization abilities; therefore, executives held on to ways of working and had habits of saying "yes" to ideas. The company culture had become undisciplined, resulting in an overrun of creative and departmental projects, questionable hiring, and anecdotal decision-making.

The CEO suspected the organization was doing too many inconsequential things. With his support, we launched a team charged with making an inventory of the activities departments and teams were working on. We identified nearly 170 discretionary / under-the-radar projects taking place.

The company then adopted a strategic screening approach to rationalize these, reducing the number to under 20. That is 150 misaligned things stifling breakthrough progress. To reference economist Milton Friedman: in organizations, "useless work drives out useful work." [3] Saying "no" 150 or more times is not simply an accounting exercise in efficiency. It's a progressive, life-giving discipline that kindles hope by unlocking significant new capacity to achieve breakthrough.

How to Let Go and Get to No

Organizations are busy places. There are projects to complete, customers to serve, meetings to lead, deliverables that are due, relationships to cultivate. Amid all this, how can leaders collectively make sense of organizational activities to close the gap on important breakthroughs? Here is a summary of practices to move past holding on.