Why are you doing that?

Picture a Monday morning in a growing business, maybe a 40-person agency or a distribution firm with a busy operations team; the leadership team is round the table, coffees in hand, and one by one each person talks through what their department did last week. Sales runs a bit long, as sales always does; operations says things are "broadly on track"; marketing puts up a slide that was emailed round on Friday afternoon, and somewhere around the time it gets to finance, people start glancing at their phones. Someone says "let's take that offline", the meeting finishes bang on time, and if you're honest about it, nothing has actually been decided.

Now, if you stopped that meeting halfway through and asked the team why they hold it, I'd bet you'd get a slightly puzzled look first, and then something along the lines of "well, we've always done it". And that answer, more than anything else, is what this piece is about; not because the Monday meeting is some great evil, but because so much of how companies run, especially small and growing ones, was never really chosen by anyone in the room. It was inherited.

We copy how other companies run

The thing I keep coming back to is that very few companies actually sit down and design how they work; most of them borrow it, usually without noticing they're doing it. A new COO joins from a big corporate and brings the system they ran there; a founder reads a book over the summer, or hires a coach, or simply looks at a company they admire and copies what they can see. And before long you've got a 40-person business running quarterly goals, a scorecard, a RACI chart and a weekly status meeting, largely because that's what serious, grown-up companies are supposed to have.

There's actually some solid research behind this, which I find quite reassuring, because it means it isn't just me noticing it. Back in 1983 two sociologists, Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, showed that organisations copy each other most when they're unsure what works, and that over time companies in the same field become more and more alike; not because the shared habits work better, but because they make a business look legitimate.

And look, there's nothing wrong with learning from other people, I've done it my whole career. The problem is what gets lost in the copy, because every one of these habits started life as an answer to a very specific problem, at a very specific size, with the tools that happened to be around at the time; and when we copy it, we keep the answer and quietly drop the problem.

When were these systems actually built?

This is the bit that really made me sit up, so bear with me. Here's when some of the most popular management systems were designed, sitting next to what else was new that same year.

Notice that not one of these was designed for a world with Slack or Teams, or video calls as a normal part of the working day, or AI that can ask a whole team a question and pull the answers together in seconds. Slack launched in 2014; most of us only started living on video calls during the 2020 lockdowns; and ChatGPT turned up at the very end of 2022.

I want to be really clear that none of this is a dig at the people who built these systems, because they were brilliant answers to the problems of their day. The question I'm asking is a different one, which is simply whether those are still our problems.

What these systems were really for

If you strip away the vocabulary and the acronyms, most management systems are doing one job underneath it all, and that job is moving information around a company.

Who's working on what, what's stuck, and are we on track? For most of the last century the only way to answer those questions was to get people into a room together, or to have them write it all down and pass it up the line; so we built a whole machinery for doing exactly that, with status meetings, monthly reports, board packs, scorecards, cascading goals and quarterly reviews.

The trouble is that all of that machinery has a cost, and I've started calling it the coordination tax. Every hour somebody spends preparing an update, sitting through a round-the-table, or reconciling a scorecard that nobody really reads is an hour that isn't being spent on the one thing that would actually move the goal. I've written more about what changes once that information is cheap in Information is cheap now. Decisions aren't.

Now, for a company of 5,000 people that tax is probably worth paying, because coordinating that many people genuinely is hard and the machinery is a big part of what holds it all together. For a company of 40, though, it's a 5,000-person tax on a 40-person business; and it lands squarely on the people with the least time to spare, which is the founder, the MD or COO, and a handful of department heads who are already stretched. When you remember that the vast majority of businesses are small or medium-sized, that's an awful lot of companies paying a tax they never signed up for.

It also explains, I think, why so many leadership teams I talk to describe the same feeling: everyone is flat out, the goal still keeps slipping, and nobody can quite put their finger on why.

"But OKRs were built for start-ups"

This is the pushback I hear most often, and to be fair it's partly right. John Doerr brought OKRs into Google in 1999, when it had only a few dozen people, and EOS was designed specifically for entrepreneurial, owner-led companies; so this isn't a simple story of big-company systems being forced onto small ones.

But here's the thing; even the systems that were built for growth were built for a world where information was expensive to gather and slow to move. All of their rituals, whether that's the quarterly reset, the weekly scorecard review or the round-the-table update, quietly assume that people have to collect and carry information by hand, and that's precisely the assumption that has changed.

And when these systems do work, which they often do, it's worth looking closely at why. In my experience it's usually because they forced a leadership team to focus on a small number of things, and the focus was the active ingredient all along; the ritual wrapped around it was really just the packaging. It's the same reason I think alignment beats activity.

Keep the principle, question the ritual

None of this means tearing everything up and starting again on Monday, because some of the old ideas are genuinely timeless; Lean's relentless war on waste, Eliyahu Goldratt's insight that any system is held back by one constraint at a time, and the simple discipline of having one clear goal will all still be true long after the tools have changed again. What dates is the ritual, not the principle.

So here's a fairly simple test you can run on any meeting, report or habit in your business, and I'd encourage you to try it on whatever's in your diary this week:

1. Is the problem it solves still our problem, at our size? A 40-person company doesn't have a 4,000-person coordination problem, however much the system it borrowed assumes it does.
2. Does it exist because information used to be hard to get? If it does, can the tools you already pay for, or AI, now do that job without the meeting or the report?
3. Is the ritual doing the job, or has it become the job? If keeping the system running takes more effort than the work it's meant to track, it has become the job.
4. Would we invent this today, from scratch, with the tools we have now? If the honest answer is no, then it's something you inherited rather than something you chose.

Most leadership teams who go through this properly, rather than nodding along, find at least one habit they'd never dream of designing today; and quite often it's the one that takes up the most time.

What we'd build instead

If you were starting a company from scratch today, with the tools we've now got, I don't think you'd build a cascade of goals, a 15-measure scorecard and a weekly round-the-table; I think you'd build something much smaller and much simpler, and it would probably look something like this.

One goal, rather than a list of eleven, because when everything is a priority the real problem tends to hide in the noise.

One honest answer to what's in the way. Most plans start with a long list of actions, but I'd start with the question that hardly anyone asks out loud, which is what is actually stopping us; and what you tend to find is that most of the items on each department's list are symptoms of one or two underlying causes, so if you clear the cause, a surprising number of the symptoms go with it.

Everyone moving on clearing it, with a handful of moves, each with a named owner, that the whole team can see; updates become a sentence rather than a report, and meetings become a place for making decisions rather than sharing status.

And when it clears, you find the next one, because this is a loop you keep running, not a plan you write once a year at an away day and then quietly forget about by March.

The machine does the asking and the admin; the people do the thinking and the deciding. That, really, is the whole idea.

I've set the whole model out, its principles, its parts and its rhythm, in The operating model for the AI era.

Try this at your next leadership meeting

You don't need any software to make a start on this, and I'd genuinely suggest trying it before you look at any tool, ours included. At your next leadership meeting, put 15 minutes aside and work through it together:

1. Ask everyone to write down every recurring meeting, report and update they're part of, however small.
2. Pick out the three that take up the most time across the team.
3. For each one, ask the question out loud: why are we doing that?
4. Run the four questions above, and agree to drop, shrink or change just one of them for a month, then see what happens.

Watch what happens to the energy in the room when you do it, because in my experience the hardest part isn't deciding what to stop; it's admitting that nobody in the room actually chose it in the first place.

So, why are you doing that?

It's the question we built Clearahead around, and it's the one AJ asks every team that uses it; not to catch anyone out, but because I've come to believe that the most useful thing a leadership team can do is question the habits it has never thought to question.

The systems that run most businesses were built for a world that's gone; the good news is that the world we've got now makes something a lot simpler possible, if we're willing to ask the question.