A leadership team often focuses on the decisions in front of it: setting direction, allocating resources, and resolving the difficult issues that reach its level. During change, those decisions can come quickly, with incomplete information and pressure to keep things moving. But every decision al...

Ask a project team who owns a decision, and watch what happens. Sometimes you get a clear answer. More often, there’s a pause. A glance around the table. A careful, “Well, it depends.” And that pause may be part of why the project is moving more slowly than everyone wants it to. Last week, I wrot...

It rarely looks like burnout. That’s the thing people miss. When a project team is running on empty, it doesn’t usually show up as someone falling apart in a meeting. It shows up quieter than that. Someone who used to raise their hand stops raising it. A person who was generous with their time st...

Most project teams believe they're making decisions about the work. Scope. Sequencing. Timelines. Trade-offs. The choices that keep a project moving and the plan on track. And they are, but they're also creating something else, usually without realizing it. Conditions. Conditions that other peopl...

  A project team makes a decision and moves on to the next one. That is how it is supposed to work. Decide. Deliver. Move. The momentum of a project depends on it. You can't stop and hold a ceremony for every choice, and no one is asking you to. But the decision does not stop moving when the team...