It was my wise and kind leader at the time who stopped my spiraling. He asked me,

At first, my response was defensive, but then as I kept talking, I realized I wasn’t suffering from a lack of information. I was struggling with a lack of courage. I was scared. Scared of getting it wrong. Scared of being the person who made the call that didn’t work out. The information requests weren’t due diligence. They were stall tactics.

The One Truth

We tell ourselves we need more information. More time. More something or another. What we actually need is the courage to decide. This might feel harsh, but it is the truth about how we operate. We dress up fear as thoroughness, strategic, due diligence. We schedule more meetings, tweak another presentation, request another report, and we call it progress.

This isn’t progress. It’s analysis paralysis wearing a very convincing disguise.

In the BANI world, with its Brittleness, Anxiety, Nonlinearity, and Incomprehensibility, where the world feels more uncontrollable, our desire for certainty before we decide will only increase. As the world starts to feel more uncertain, our need for certainty and control will also increase, leading us to seek more data, more information, more reports, and more presentations. AI will make this worse because it can provide us so much information and data faster than we can read and absorb it.

The One Insight

Our brain wiring works against us here. Our brains are wired to believe that more information is always better. It gives us the illusion of control. Our brains also want to save us the pain of loss, and being wrong is painful, so avoiding doing something that saves us pain or potential pain is a strong incentive. Our brains also don’t cope well with ambiguity, so we keep seeking more and more information, trying to find certainty. These biases create the perfect conditions for analysis paralysis.

In the external world, in organizations, this shows up as endless meetings, presentations built and rebuilt. And a decision that never gets made. Everyone is busy, but nothing is moving forward. This is Stuckifyed.

That indecision isn’t free. It has a cost. Every meeting that ends without a decision has a cost. Every “let’s get more information” has a cost. The time you and your teams spend on these activities costs money.

Insight into Action

Once I realized I wasn’t lacking information, I was lacking courage. I asked my leader, how do I know, I know enough. He shared with me something he learned from Colin Powell, the American army general, diplomat, and statesman. He called it the 40-70 rule. When facing a decision, we need between 40% and 70% of the available information to make it. With less than 40%, we are guessing. Waiting to have more than 70% wastes time, and we risk losing the opportunity. That missing 30% is where your experience and expertise need to come into play.

The next time you feel the pull to ask for more information, pause and ask yourself:

If you have between 40% and 70%, you have enough. This isn’t about being reckless. It’s about being pragmatic. More information won’t make the fear go away. Making decisions and moving forward will.

The other thing that will help with the fear is experimentation. When we have 40% of information, we don’t have to leap. We can take small steps and test our ideas and assumptions. So, the next question you can ask yourself is

Small steps help us build proof points, reduce risk, and build our confidence.

Getting Unstuckifyed

Making decisions is scary. The fear of getting it wrong is real, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. We also need to stop pretending that indecision is free; it’s not. Stalling won’t make you brave; deciding will. We don’t have to leap; we can start with small steps. So, the next time you are facing a big decision, ask yourself, " Where am I on the 40% - 70% scale? If you are in between that space, get started.

Till Next Time,

In the BANI world, chasing perfect information is a fool’s errand. If you had perfect information, then why would your organizations ned your skills, experience, and expertise?

Thanks for getting Unstuckifyed with me.

Dr Dani

"Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing." ~ Peter Drucker

These two words are so closely related that if you blink, you might miss that there's a difference. But in practice, on the ground, inside real organizations, with real teams, they mean very different things. And getting the order wrong has consequences.

The One Truth

For most of the twentieth century, efficiency was the goal, and it made sense. Repeatable processes with minimal error, performed at speed, that was the recipe for success in the Factory Age.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and organizations have modernized, but at their core, modern organizations still carry what they inherited from the Factory Age. The assumption that efficiency is always the goal, if we could just run leaner, move faster, cut more, the outcomes will get better.

Efficiency is great when we are working with repetitive tasks. When we do the same thing over and over, we get better at it. But most of the work we do today isn’t repetitive. The world today is contextual, constantly shifting, requiring judgment, adaptation, and constant recalibration.

Efficiency also requires a stable external environment. Think about the BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible) world we are living in today, where nothing is stable. When our work and our world are no longer well-suited to efficiency, what do we focus on instead?

The One Insight

The answer is effectiveness — doing the right thing. But in a BANI world, even that isn't as straightforward as it sounds. In the BANI World, the context shifts under our feet, sometimes daily. What worked last quarter may be irrelevant this quarter. The AI tool we built a workflow around got a major update. The priorities shifted. The market moved. Things move so quickly, we don’t have time to know if we are doing things right because often we won’t know until we’ve done it.

This is where the second part of that Peter Drucker quote comes into play.

The trap we fall into is that we keep chasing doing this right (efficiency) before we understand what the right thing we need to be doing is (effectiveness). What we also fail to realize is that when the context is always changing, efficiency starts to feel like an illusion we are chasing.

Here is a quick story to bring this to life. Some years ago, I was asked to consult on a project involving a contact center. They had just completed some process optimization work and were seeing some weird numbers. The agents with the highest customer ratings were performing the worst, according to the new dashboard. Before they moved to put these agents on performance management, they asked me to have a look, and I did. And what I discovered is that one of the key metrics for determining whether you were a strong performer was completing a call in less than 2 minutes. So, the “high performers” were working quickly to get through calls within the 2-minute timeframe, regardless of whether they actually helped the customer. The ones who were actually helping customers were taking 5-7 minutes per call. These so-called “low performers” were actually being effective while the “high performers” were being efficient. I’m pretty sure this isn’t unique to this specific contact center, but I like to use this example because it helps to show the difference between effectiveness and efficiency. And when you are dealing with non-repetitive tasks, effectiveness is what’s important.

When we are trying to be efficient, when the situation calls for effectiveness, we get Stuckifyed.

What makes the efficiency trap even harder to escape is that our brains are wired for it. Our brains have a preference for conserving energy, which means they are always looking for efficiencies. So, our brain wiring and the Factory Age inheritance organizations carry make escaping the efficiency trap challenging.

Insight into Action

We need to move to focusing on effectiveness - doing the right things. But in the BANI world, we often don’t know what the right things are until we’ve tried them, which requires shifting how we think about them. The right things are no longer permanently fixed actions; once we find them, they stick. What we need to do instead is experiment, continuously experiment to test, learn, and adjust.

So, in today’s work, being effective isn’t about having the right answers; it’s about the willingness to find good answers, and that requires being open to failing. This requires both a mindset shift at the individual level and a culture shift at the organizational level. But, ask you know by now, getting Unstuckifyed is all about building momentum quickly, so here is the one question you can use to start making this shift. Before leaping into action on a project or a decision, ask yourself, ask the team, are we being effective here or efficient? Which is more important right now?

That pause to ask the question and think about how you and your team are showing up, is a small step that will ignite a bigger shift.

Getting Unstuckifyed

In our current world, chasing efficiency is just sophisticated busyness. Reprioritizing effectiveness requires a mindset and cultural shift, but we don’t have to start big. We can start small by asking a question. Am I doing the right thing or just doing things right? And which matters more right now?

Remember, Effectiveness first. Efficiency will follow.

Till Next Time

The pursuit of efficiency isn’t wrong. It’s just been given a job it wasn’t designed to do in conditions it was never built for. In a world that won’t sit still, we have to be more effective more often than we’re efficient. And that starts with one honest question before we act.

Thanks for getting Unstuckifyed with me.

Dr Dani

One thing doesn’t go according to plan, and all of a sudden…

Yesterday, I was out on a walk with a friend of mine. He was sharing an issue he was facing. As he described the issue, I could feel the weight he was feeling. And then all of a sudden, he went down this path: “What if I lose my job over this, and it’s a bad economy, but if I end up losing my house…”

Sound familiar? We’ve all been there (usually at 2 or 3 AM), where a bump on the road becomes Mt Everest.

Why do our brains do this?

The One Truth

Catastrophizing isn’t a design flaw; it is actually a key feature in our brain designed to keep us safe. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

The human brain, as we know it today, is the result of millions of years of evolution. Today, human brains live in the modern world, but our prehistoric ancestors lived on the savannah, where their primary focus was on finding food, water, shelter, and not becoming lion food. In these conditions, underestimating a threat was more costly, likely resulting in death. So, our brains developed a preference toward overestimating threats. Pretty clever, huh?

Behavioral scientists call this negativity bias - the tendency to give more weight to threats than opportunities. Historically, for human survival, miscalculating a threat was life-threatening.

As clever as our brains are, they are not always smart. Our brains haven’t quite caught up to the fact that we now live in the modern world, and for more of us, there is a low chance of getting killed by a lion. But our brains don’t recognize that. So that dump thing you said in that meeting that everyone else has probably forgotten about, that you are still thinking about, all your brain here is ROAR.

Another reason our brains catastrophize is that they don’t like uncertainty. Let’s say you’ve just applied for a mortgage to buy a new house. Now, you have the hard work of waiting. Will you get approved? Will you get declined? Way too much uncertainty. The brain attempts to resolve this uncertainty by putting forward a resolution, but rather than thinking, I will get approved (the positive bias), it will likely lean toward, I will get decline (the negative bias) because it views the decline as a threat and it is better to caution against a threat and be wrong than be optimistic and be wrong.

The One Insight

Catastrophizing tells us a few things about our brains. First, is that, our brains are imaginative. Isn’t it amazing how we can take one dumb thing we said and turn it into a career-ending move? Second, is how fungible our brains are. If we can quickly turn a dump in the road into Mt Everest, we could also channel that into a more positive direction. The same brain that just mapped out every catastrophic outcome of that missed deadline with remarkable speed, detail, and emotional vividness is also capable of doing the exact opposite. Your brain can imagine things going well. It can imagine the most likely scenario. It just needs some direction to work for you instead of against you. And this redirection is important because when we imagine what can go well, we are hopeful, and when we are hopeful, we move. When we catastrophize, we get stuck.

Insight into Action

Move. When you notice yourself catastrophizing, close the screen, stand up, and get going. Pace, stretch, get outside for a walk, anything that will get your body physically moving. This will interrupt the mental loops that fuel catastrophizing, help burn cortisol (the stress hormone), and reset your brain to think more clearly.

Scenario Plan. Get a sheet of paper. Draw three columns. Label the right column “Worst Case,” the middle column “Most Likely”, and the left column “Best Case”. Now fill it out, starting on the right. Write the worst case first, in full. Let the imagination do its thing. Then move to the left, and here once again, give the imagination full permission. What does the best case actually look like? What could genuinely go well? What's possible if things break in your favor? Then move to the middle, what’s most likely to happen? This is where you need to think about the rational middle, which is easier to do when you’ve gotten the extreme ends out. This works because writing engages the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for logical reasoning).

Talk It Out. This is especially important if you are an extrovert who needs to process externally. This is effective for introverts too, but introverts may not naturally feel the need/want to talk it out. This works because putting our feelings into words reactivates the prefrontal cortex, but unlike thinking it out or writing it out, when you say it out loud to someone, you put distance between the feelings and create space for your rational brain to kick in.

Pro Tip: Combine talking with someone with movements, say a walk.

Get Unstuckifyed

Catastrophizing can keep us stuck, running endless scenarios that never end well. Catastrophizing is our brain’s weird way of keeping us safe, and it is evidence of your strong, vivid imagination. We can use that imagination to point ourselves in a more positive direction…we can force ourselves to think about what’s the best that could happen? We can ask ourselves to consider what’s most likely to happen?

Til Next Time,

We don’t have to be victims of our brain wiring; we can rewire it, and that’s a key part of getting Unstuckifyed.

Thanks for getting Unstuckifyed with me.

Dr Dani

…a heightened level of fear driven by the heightened level of uncertainty.

Fear is always the underlying emotion when we are struggling to make decisions - what if we get it wrong? The difference I noticed last week is that people have reached a point where they are no longer just feeling it; fear is no longer the underlying feeling. It is the overt feeling, so overt that they are verbalizing it.

On the one hand, this is good because labeling our feelings helps us process them and move forward. But it also means that we’ve reached such a heightened level of fear that it is pouring out of us.

Is it any wonder, though? The economy is barely hanging on. Budgets are tightening. There is a war...multiple wars. The cost of living keeps climbing. And somehow, all the while, we still have to carry on. The quarterly goals still need to be met. The dog still needs to be walked. The food still needs to be bought and cooked. The weekly dashboards need to be reviewed. All the ordinary tasks of our lives have to continue while we carry the weight of the world that feels like it could tip over at any moment. So, yes, in this context, making the big decisions, the ones where millions of dollars are at stake, career-building decisions, life-changing decisions, the types of decisions we struggle with in “normal” circumstances are feeling extra hard right now.

I’m seeing a lot more Stuckifying behavior emerging. Requests for more data. Getting more input from more stakeholders. Putting things on hold until things settle down. More meetings to discuss the same thing. The level of activity that’s happening creates the illusion of work. When in reality, there is no actual progress.

The One Truth

There is no settling down or going back to normal. Remember when we thought getting through the pandemic would return us to normal? It didn’t. The pandemic dissipated, but we didn’t have a reprieve because inflation, then a recession, now multiple wars, all disrupting economic stability, one after another after another. This is life in the BANI world. Systems that have worked reliably are suddenly disrupted, showing their Brittleness. Too many things are happening at once, so cause and effect are Nonlinear, and this intertwined mess is too Incomprehensible to know where to start fixing it. And all of this is driving up the Anxiety further paralyzing our decision-making because our brains don’t cope well with uncertainty.

There is a line in my upcoming book that I keep going back to this week, and it is this:

And this helps to explain why we are putting off decisions. At this moment, waiting to make a decision, as painful as that is, it is the space we know best, and there is some comfort in that… a false sense of comfort.

The One Insight

But here’s the thing, indecision isn’t free…there is a cost to it, and our brains are very good at covering up that cost. Right now, we are facing a lot of uncertainty, and our brains view uncertainty as a threat. When our brains feel threatened, it executes what we call the amygdala hijack. The amygdala (the oldest part of our brain that mostly operates on automatic responses) takes over, rendering the prefrontal cortex (the newest part of our brain where all executive function and decision-making happens) inoperative.

When the amygdala is in charge, the focus is on survival. All the energy goes into the here and now. We prioritize quick actions like meetings, creating reports, and presentations. Big decisions, strategic work, when our brain is in survival mode, are deemed a low priority, so we never get to them. But because we are so busy with the quick, here-and-now actions, it creates the illusion that we are productive. It falsely reassures us that waiting to decide is the right thing to do.

Here’s a quick story to illustrate this point. In 2025, I was working with a leadership team that was exploring the option of expanding to a new market. The research was completed, and a plan was formulated, but geopolitical uncertainties posed some risks. They decided to put the initiative on hold until things settled down. Fast forward to 2026, and a competitor is now dominating that market. The competitive advantage my client could have had is now lost, and if they want to move into that market, it is now more expensive to do so.

But my client isn’t alone in this; history is full of examples. Remember Kodak? Their decision to delay bringing their invention, the digital camera, led to the collapse of their business.

Indecision has a cost. We are good at spotting it in others. Our brains do a great job of fooling us into thinking that this cost doesn’t apply to us.

Insight into Action

If the certainty we’re waiting for isn’t coming, what do we do?

Verbalize the Fear: We tend to dismiss or suppress our feelings; most of us have been socialized to do so, especially in professional settings. But feelings don’t just go away because we hide them. In fact, the more we try to bury them, the stronger they get. Remember the amygdala hijack response that renders your prefrontal cortex inoperable? When we use words to describe our feelings, we help reactivate the prefrontal cortex…this is how we disrupt the hijack. Putting our feelings into words helps us move to more rational thinking.

Stay Firm on the Goal but Flexible on the How: Let’s say you are in Seattle and you’ve planned a trip to NYC. Your goal is to get to NYC. Your plan is to fly there. Now, let’s say that there was a severe weather storm that cancelled all the flights. If you are fixated on your plan to fly to NYC, there is zero chance you will accomplish your goal. But if you are fixated on the goal, that opens you up to different options. Perhaps you could drive? Bus? Train? This is how life works most of the time anyway. We plan, but how often do things go according to plan?

Small Testable Actions: In uncertainty, big leaps feel scary…they are scary. But big leaps are not the only way to get things done. Small actions can also get us there. So, ask yourself, what’s the smallest first step I can take? Then do that. See how it goes. Let that inform the second step and so on. Thinking back to our Seattle to NYC trip. Perhaps you try to drive, but you can only reach Utah before the storm makes it impossible to keep going. Maybe you have to wait a few days to get on a bus that takes you to a city that isn’t affected by the storm. Sure, it isn’t the direct trip you were planning, but you are making progress.

Get Unstuckifyed

Fear can make us feel alone, so if you take anything away from this week’s newsletter, let it be this - YOU ARE NOT ALONE (oof…did I just quote Michael Jackson 🤦🏽‍♀️). But seriously, we are all feeling the uncertainty. Despite all my training and research in this area, I struggle with uncertainty too. Our fear response to uncertainty is the result of millions of years of brain evolution.

Fear is our brain trying to protect us because it doesn’t want us to become lion food. To move from feeling to rational thinking, we need to put our feelings into words. Ironic, isn’t it?!

So the first, smallest step to get started with… verbalize the fear… activate the prefrontal cortex.

Till Next Time

Uncertainty isn’t a new problem, but it is becoming more intense. It won’t get any better. What’s within our control is getting better at working with uncertainty. We cannot keep waiting. We can’t keep stalling. We have to get on with it.

Thanks for getting Unstuckifyed with me.

Dr Dani

It was the third month in a row we were staring down disappointing metrics. The frustration in that call was the kind you could feel through a screen, the tight voices, the careful word choices, the collective exhaustion of people who had been working hard and had nothing to show for it. And then my boss said it:

The call kept moving. Someone responded. Someone else offered a suggestion. But I wasn’t there anymore. My mind had wandered somewhere else entirely, turning over one question I couldn’t shake.

How can we be stuck when we are all so busy?

I didn’t have the answer that day or for many years later. But that question occupied my mind, and many years later, when I was well into my research, I began to understand the paradox we were working within.

The One Truth

The word stuck implies a lack of movement, stillness. But the stuckness organizations are experiencing today isn’t a lack of motion. It’s actually the opposite; calendars are filled with back-to-back meetings, inboxes are overflowing, and task lists are continuously growing. Despite all of this activity, results remain stagnant.

No. The stuckness organizations are experiencing isn’t your run-of-the-mill, conventional stuckness. It isn’t tires-in-the-mud kind of stuckness. It’s not the kind where you can’t figure out the clue in the crossword puzzle. It’s not even gridlock-traffic stuckness where you’re simply waiting for things to clear. The stuckness organizations are experiencing is multi-factorial, deeply embedded, and stubbornly persistent. The stuckness organizations are experiencing is invisibly visible - we all feel it but cannot quite explain it. A level of stuckness so unique, it needed its own word to define it.

Welcome to Stuckifyed!

The inability to make meaningful progress on outcomes that matter.

The One Insight

Stuckifyed is not stillness. It's the illusion of momentum. And what makes it so hard to see from the inside is that all the motion, the meetings, the emails, the plans, make it look like progress. Until we pause and look at what's actually been accomplished.

Stuckifyed feels like

• Solving the same problem over and over, no matter what you try, the problem just doesn’t go away

• Exhaustion, teams are so busy, to the point of burnout, but the results don’t reflect the effort

• Making and following through on decisions is impossible; everything is second-guessed, re-evaluated

Why are we Stuckifyed?

The stuckness organizations are experiencing is the result of three forces that have been developing over decades, colliding to create the perfect storm. The perfect storm of stuckness.

• Our Brain Wiring - We are living in the modern world, but our brains are still running on 18th-century software, wired for survival on the savannah, not thriving in the digital AI age.

• Factory Age Legacy - The way we organize work was designed for factories where rigid hierarchies and standardized processes were essential to success, and the problems faced were linear problems with predictable solutions. Despite all of our efforts to modernize, at their core, organizations still operate like 18th-century factories.

• Transition from VUCA to BANI - Our competitive context is transitioning from VUCA (a world that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) to BANI (a world that is brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible). This transition doesn’t mean the elements of VUCA disappear; it is an add-on. And we haven’t been taught how to solve problems, make decisions, or get work done in this context.

These three forces feed each other. Our brain wiring feels right at home in the rigid Factory Age structures. The Factory Age models are completely mismatched to the BANI world we operate in. And the BANI world keeps triggering our brains into survival mode. Round and round we go.

Insight into Action

How can we be stuck when we are all so busy? That wasn’t a question I could answer on that call, but many years later, I saw it in the research, and then I couldn’t unsee it.

Our brains were doing what brains do — defaulting to the familiar. More meetings. More data requests. More circling back. We were busy, doing what we’ve always done. Going to meetings, responding to emails, and the organization’s routines and rituals kept us busy. But we never stopped to question (1) are we doing the right things? (2) How does all of this activity help us deliver results?

Our structures were doing what Factory Age structures do — maintaining control, rewarding efficiency while ignoring effectiveness. Another slide deck. Another cut of the data. Another week of the same. We were in a loop of analysis, discussion, and executing routines that created the illusion of progress. In reality, we were busy but not productive.

And the world we were operating in? It kept shifting underneath us. The conditions that shaped last quarter’s metrics weren’t the same conditions we were now facing. But we were still trying to solve for them as if they were. The external world was evolving, but we were too busy, wrapped up in our meetings and slide decks, to notice.

That's the perfect storm of stuckness. And it was hiding in plain sight the whole time.

Get Unstukifyed

The takeaway here is this: We have to question what we are spending our time doing. Look at your calendar. What is taking up your day? How is that time helping you achieve the business outcome you are expected to deliver? Are you keeping those routines alive simply because that’s what you’ve always done? Or does it serve an actual purpose in getting results?

If you feel the pull to keep going to the meetings, is that real? Or is that your brain wiring keeping you safe and comfortable?

Is another cut of the data or more information really going to improve the quality of the decision? Or are you just delaying making the tough call?

If more data feels like the right answer, is that real? Or is that your brain wiring trying to cope with ambiguity and resolve uncertainty? Or is it the Factory Age Legacy telling you mistakes are not to be tolerated? Or is it the anxiety of the BANI world paralyzing decision-making?

These questions won’t solve the stuckness on their own. But they’ll start to show you where it lives. And that’s where we begin. One thing research has consistently taught me is the importance of reflection. And not just my research, a Harvard study found that spending just 15 minutes reflecting improves performance by 23%. So before anything else, start there. Sit with the questions. See what comes up.

Ironically, getting Unstuckifyed starts with pausing…pausing to reflect.

Figuring out the recipe to get Unstuckifyed took a few more years of research and testing, and I look forward to sharing more on that with you soon.

Till Next Time

It's been in front of us and invisible at the same time. We've all felt the symptoms but couldn't name it. Now we can. And that's the starting point to getting Unstuckifyed.

Thanks for getting Unstuckifyed with me.

Dr Dani

Then I remembered, I was training for a half-marathon. I was meant to be getting up to train. The moment I remembered, my brain went to bargaining mode…Do we have to start today? Can we do it after work? Let’s start next week? The decision was to get out of bed, into the cold, and run or stay in the warmth of my cozy bed.

This went on for months.

Every week, I had a distance goal to meet, and week after week, I failed to meet it. Every week, the gap between where I was and where I needed to be grew as race day drew closer. And then came the frustration…why was I failing to follow through on this commitment? The crazy thing was that I loved running, so this was something I enjoyed doing, it was something I wanted to do, yet I was failing to do it.

Why do we fail to follow through on things we actually want to do?

The One Truth

We assume that wanting something bad enough will be sufficient to change what we do. So, we set goals and make plans… and then, when the alarm goes off at 445 AM, we do what we’ve always done. Then we blame it on the lack of motivation and discipline. The truth? It has more to do with our identity.

As humans, we have a deep-seated need to act in alignment with who we believe we are - this is called cognitive dissonance theory. The theory states that when our actions do not align with who we believe we are, it causes psychological discomfort, and our brains move us towards resolving that discomfort.

What this means is that I was motivated to run, I set the goal, and I had a plan, but when that alarm went off at 445 AM (which was already discomforting), I acted in a way that aligned most with my identity.

Cognitive dissonance isn’t just an individual thing; it also applies to groups and organizations. For example, if an organization’s identity is grounded in location-based work that happens between 9 and 5, it’s likely to struggle with flexible working. If an organization’s collective identity is stable and predictable, it will struggle to embrace innovation.

So, the takeaway here is that we behave in ways consistent with who we believe we are, and this holds true at the individual, team, and organizational levels.

The One Insight

While I was grumbling away about my lack of marathon training, Charles Duhigg had published The Power of Habit and introduced what he called the habit loop — cue, routine, reward. The book landed on my doorstep (thanks to Amazon), and I devoured it, wondering how I might use this to solve my training problem.

If you are not familiar with the habit loop, here is a quick overview:

• Cue (the trigger): the signal that initiates the habit

• Routine (the action): the behavior which can be a physical act, a feeling, or a thought

• Reward (the payoff): the positive reinforcement that tells our brains the routine is worth repeating

Going back to my running example, when the alarm went off (the cue), I turned it off, bargained with myself, and went back to sleep (the routine), and the cozy bed was the reward. The weird thing is, I wasn’t actually going back to sleep; I stayed awake, I just didn’t go for the run.

I decided I would make some attempts to change the cue. At first, I put my alarm on top of my running shoes, which I kept out in the hall. This meant that when it went off, I would have to physically get out of bed, changing the routine. But then, I would faff around with getting dressed to go for a run and not quite make it. So, then I decided I would go to sleep in my running clothes (clean ones). This is how my habit loop changed:

• Alarm goes off, and I stumble out of bed and into the hall. I’m already dressed for the activity I intend to do, and oh look, there’s my phone alarm going off on my running shoes. Multiple cues.

• Well, I am already up and dressed, might as well go for the run. The Routine.

• The runner’s high and crossing off my distance goal on my training calendar. The Reward.

The cues weren’t just about changing the habit loop; it was also about changing my identity. I slept in running shoes; I had running shoes; I went for runs; therefore, I must be a runner. And so, I must run.

Insight into Action

The habit loop can help realign our beliefs about ourselves, and it’s not just effective at the individual level. It’s also effective at the team and organizational level. Here is a real example.

I was working with a leadership team in a highly regulated industry. A big part of their new strategy was the need for innovation. The leadership team was growing increasingly frustrated at the lack thereof.

We are just not open to any new ideas, is the statement one of the leaders made.

Spending some time meeting with their teams, I came to the conclusion that the underlying collective belief within the organization was that mistakes are detrimental.

• The identity belief was: We do not make mistakes

• The desired behavior was: We need to innovate

Can you see the conflict?

Their identity was tied to being a company that didn’t make mistakes. Innovation requires some failure; you cannot innovate and get it right every time. The identity-to-goal mismatch meant the organization would resolve the mismatch by resisting innovation.

Here is what that looked like as a habit loop

• Cue: New idea

• Routine: Resist it, ignore it, fight like hell to keep it from happening

• Reward: No mistakes

To change this, I introduced the concepts of sharing failure stories. I told the leadership team they needed to talk, on a daily basis, about something they tried and failed at. They looked at me like I was nuts (a look I’m very used to), and after some convincing, they agreed.

The next thing we did was change the reward. Rather than rewarding only successes, they started recognizing and rewarding effort - the ideas that were tested.

Here is how the new habit loop looked:

• Stories about how leaders had tried new things and failed. The cue.

• Questioning, what could I try? The Routine.

• Celebrating what was tried, rewarded for testing new ideas. The Reward.

Once again, changing the cue wasn’t just about changing the habit loop; it was about changing identity. The organizations needed to move from an identity of we don’t make mistakes to we innovate from failure. The more they heard about how leaders were trying new things and how they didn’t always go as planned, the more the organization's identity shifted toward one that believed they could try new things, fail, and learn from them.

A few disclaimers

1. Risk-taking is possible even in highly regulated environments, but risk-taking doesn’t mean a free-for-all. There is such a thing as weighted risk. So, this isn’t about encouraging reckless behavior but recognizing that you cannot be an innovative company if your teams are too scared to make any mistakes.

2. This type of change doesn’t happen overnight. It takes persistent effort over time. Identity isn’t formed overnight, and it won’t shift overnight either.

3. When sharing failure stories, they have to be genuine. Stories that are disguised as humblebrags don’t work.

Get Unstuckifyed

Your turn.

Look at one repeated behavior in your organization (e.g., a standing meeting, a weekly status report) that everyone knows isn’t adding any value, but nobody stops. Ask yourself, what identity is this behavior protecting? Take it a step further and have this conversation with your team.

Till Next Time

Remember, identity, whether at an individual, team, or organizational level, plays a role in our behavior. So, sometimes, the stuckness we experience is because that is who we believe we are…the good news is that identity is changeable.

Thanks for getting Unstuckifyed with me.

Dr Dani

That was the statement that kicked off a massive event to bring over 10,000 people together, to reset and realign with the new strategy. Sitting in the audience, listening to the CEO speak, if you had walked in off the street, you would have thought you were at a rock concert. We saw demos, heard stories, and saw what was possible. The energy that week was contagious, and you couldn’t help but be excited.

And then, the week came to a close. On Monday, we all returned to our regularly scheduled work - the same meetings, the same to-do list.

Then a few months later, I was sitting in a quarterly planning meeting. We were reviewing progress on the key initiatives that were planned based on the week-long event. Most of them were struggling to make progress. I sat there wondering, if these are our strategic priorities, why do they feel like they are always on the back burner?

That gap between the electricity of the event and the lack of real progress in the months that followed, that’s what sparked my thinking about organizational stuckness.

The One Truth

When I started researching organizational stuckness, my hypothesis was that there was one singular reason, a root cause. And as it sometimes happens in research, my hypothesis was wrong.

Organizational stuckness is the result of multiple things coming together at the same time. I’ve taken to calling it the perfect storm of stuckness. The combination of our brain wiring plus organizations steeped in factory age legacies, and rapid unpredictable shifts in the world are the three forces that come together to create stuckness. But this stuckness doesn’t meet your traditional definition of stuck. This is a form of stuckness that happens while we are in motion, it is the stuckness that happens when we are busy jumping on calls, running to meetings, putting out fires. It’s a tricky kind of stuckness that we cannot really put our finger on but we sense it is there - hence why I coined the term Stuckifyed to describe the level of stuckness we are experiencing today.

So, when I was sitting there in the quarterly review meeting, watching all the activity around me, I could sense it, but I couldn’t name it. And I couldn’t answer the question - what was causing this?

The One Insight

Our brains love novelty. A big event that breaks up the monotonous work week triggers excitement. That electricity in the room was real. What’s also real is that our brains struggle to translate big abstract ideas into clear, manageable actions.

But then Monday rolls around, we are back to our regularly scheduled work lives. After a week away, we are greeted with full inboxes, packed calendars, and an overflowing to-do list. We are excited about what we learned at the big event, but we are not sure where to get started. The combination of business as usual and new strategic work is overwhelming, and this brings me to another feature of our brains.

Our brains want to conserve energy. Figuring out what to do takes far more energy than carrying on with what we’ve always done. So, we jump into the meetings we’ve always attended, respond to the emails, and scan the to-do list for the easiest tasks. We tell ourselves, we’ll get to the strategy work, just as soon as…[insert your preferred alternative task here]. Mine is caught up on emails.

But our brain wiring isn’t solely to blame. Organizations play their part in this, too. The strategy is set at the top, as it should be, but what doesn’t happen that should is translating the strategy so that everyone understands what it means for their level. What does all of this energy and excitement mean on Monday? What do I need to stop, start, and continue? Where do I get started? This level of clarity is almost never provided to the people who need it most.

You have a strategy that people struggle to translate, and the prior work that may or may not align with the new strategy isn’t reviewed to see what work should stop, what should continue, and what needs to start. The result is piling on more stuff. This combination is fatal because, when people are feeling stretched with a workload that has tasks they know how to do and tasks they have to figure out, the easy stuff will get priority, while the important, hard stuff gets pushed to the bottom of the list.

Insight into Action

Getting Unstuckifyed requires giving people a clear starting point. Not just any starting point, the smallest possible first step. And if you are scoffing at this…hear me out. Yes, I agree it is a very simple insight to action, but over the past 12 years, I have collected so many examples of how leaders failed to do this that I could write a book (and so I did).

The smallest possible first step is effective because it reduces a few things our brains don’t like…ambiguity, overwhelm, and energy expenditure. But there is also another reason…

You know that feeling you get when you have crossed something off your to-do list? That feeling of satisfaction? That is your brain rewarding you with a release of dopamine (the reward hormone). It is literally your brain’s cheerleader going “yay, you.” Every time we cross something off the list, we are rewarded. And that reward encourages us to do the next thing. And the next thing. It is a self-fulfilling upward cycle that helps us build momentum toward achieving big things.

And when you pair this with the electrifying energy of a novelty event (like the one in my example), you create an effective recipe for generating outcomes quickly.

Get Unstuckifyed

Okay. It’s your turn to try it. What’s the big thing in your world right now - the project, the decision - that you are stuck on? What’s the smallest possible step you can get started with?

And here is a bonus pro-tip: Once you’ve identified it, schedule it. Put it in your calendar like a meeting.

Till Next Time

Organizational stuckness is a tricky problem. What we actually see and experience are symptoms. And when we don’t understand what’s triggering them, our attempts to fix them don’t work. That frustration is why I do this work because it doesn’t have to be this way - better is possible.

Thanks for checking out the first edition of Unstuckifyed with Dr Dani. Tune in next week, when we dive into why our brains keep us stuck, even when we know better.

Thanks for getting Unstuckifyed with me.

Dr Dani

If this sounds like you, welcome! You’ve landed in the right place.

Your organization is stuck…but here’s the thing. It’s not your people. It’s not your strategy. It’s not your tech. And no, AI won’t fix it.

It’s how we’ve all been taught to think about problems. And what we’ve been taught was never built for the world we’re actually operating in now.

That mismatch is costing organizations millions. Up to 30% of their productivity every year.

Think about that. Nearly a third of everything your organization has to give — your people’s energy, your budget, your time — is wasted.

I know this pain because I’ve been there too.

After 7 years in the corporate leadership trenches watching this pattern repeat, I went looking for a better way. 12 years of research later, I found it.

It doesn’t have to be that way. And that’s what this newsletter is all about.

Every week, I unpack one uncomfortable truth about why organizations get and stay stuck, and I share one insight from my research to help you get unstuck.

So if you are ready to stop the spin, had enough of the frameworks and methods, and are ready to make real progress, subscribe to get your weekly dose of Unstuckifyed.

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