Busyness Without Progress - Welcome to Stuckifyed
Why busyness
That was the question that distracted me from the conversation. It was my boss’s weekly lead team meeting, where she brought together all of her direct reports.
“But how can we be stuck, if we are all so busy?”
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:
“It’s like we are stuck and don’t even know 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