Yes, you are funding problems!
There’s a version of busy that feels productive but isn’t going anywhere.
You’re spending time. You’re spending money. Your team is working hard. Meetings are happening, fixes are being applied, progress is being reported. And yet, something isn’t shifting. The condition you started with — it’s still there. Maybe slightly different in shape. But fundamentally the same.
This is one of the more expensive traps an executive can fall into. Not because the work is lazy. Because the work is real — and pointed at the wrong thing.
Think about a restaurant that keeps losing customers. Management responds by retraining staff, redesigning the menu, running promotions. All legitimate interventions. All executed with effort. But if the real problem is location — if the site simply doesn’t have the foot traffic to sustain the business — then every dollar spent improving service is a dollar spent more efficiently failing.
The work isn’t wrong. The decision underneath it is.
Or think about an organisation that hired the wrong person for a critical role. Rather than confront that decision, they build around it. Add support staff. Redistribute work. Redesign reporting lines. Create a structure to compensate for a mismatch that should have been addressed directly. Months pass. The structure grows more elaborate. The problem remains — now embedded deeper.
Both scenarios follow the same logic: the decision was wrong, but rather than revisit the decision, we invested in managing its consequences.
This is the part that’s hard to see from inside it.
Fixing things feels like progress. When you apply a solution and something improves — even slightly — your brain registers that as meaningful movement. You feel the satisfaction of action. And in organisations, that feeling is reinforced socially: your team sees you doing something, leadership sees activity, reports show effort.
But if the root cause is a decision — not a process, not a person’s performance, not a system configuration — then the fixes are not reducing the problem. They’re accumulating around it.
The firefighting never ends because the fire has a source you haven’t addressed.
Before you approve the next round of effort, ask one question honestly:
Have I made the right decisions?
Not: is the team performing well? Not: are we following the right process? Not: is the vendor delivering? Those questions all assume the decision beneath them was sound.
The harder question is earlier than all of that. Was the right ERP selected? Was the right partner engaged? Was the right person put in the role? Was the right structure chosen for this program?
If the answer to any of those is no — or even probably not — then everything built on top of that decision is load-bearing work on a cracked foundation.
More effort won’t fix that. A different decision will.
The most clarifying thing an executive can do when things aren’t moving — when resources are being consumed and the original condition persists — is to stop before deploying the next fix and ask whether the problem is the work, or the decision the work is serving.
Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is less of the thing you’re already doing, and more of the thing you’ve been avoiding.
