Why Work Gets Back Up (And It's Not Where You Think)

Nothing humbles you faster than thinking you can fix your own toilet.

We tried.

A few quick adjustments… thought we had it.

We didn’t. Like really didn’t.

What we realized pretty quickly is that the issue wasn’t what we could see, it was what we couldn’t. There was a bottleneck underneath everything that we had zero visibility into. So we called someone who did.

And that’s when it clicked.

This is exactly what happens inside teams.

When something isn’t working, we tend to focus on what’s visible:

• the process

• the person

• the immediate task

We make small adjustments and assume that should fix it. But most breakdowns don’t live at the surface. They live underneath:

• unclear ownership

• work that sits between roles

• decision bottlenecks that no one has named

So instead of fixing the real issue, teams start working around it. People step in where they shouldn’t have to. High performers become the default problem-solvers. Work slows down—not because it’s complex, but because it’s stuck. And over time, it starts to feel like a capacity issue… when it’s actually a visibility issue. You can’t fix what you can’t see.

That’s why the first step isn’t doing more.

It’s stepping back and asking a better question: "Where is the work actually getting stuck?"

Because once you can see that clearly, everything else gets easier to fix.