Impacting a system you didn’t design
Hello again!
Last month's newsletter on the value of pausing drew a lot of replies, and one of them raised a question that made me pause myself. A reader agreed that slowing down matters, then pushed the idea further:
"How do we get out of this 'busy is better' status culture and stop celebrating churning out work that isn't valuable? I think one answer is the pause, but I feel there is more that can be set by leadership."
They are right. It is easy to tell someone to slow down and think. It is much harder when the environment around them treats visible activity as the measure of worth. A lot of leadership today does not protect the time to pause and think, and some of it actively erodes that time. Leadership shapes these conditions more than any individual can. Most of us, though, are working within those conditions rather than setting them, and still want to do good work.
So the question raised becomes: what can one person do inside a system they did not design and cannot change alone?
Where the work actually stalls
An environment you cannot redesign still runs on decisions, dozens of them a week, and those sit far closer to your reach. Look at where work actually breaks down, and it is rarely a shortage of effort or intelligence. Usually, it is decisions that never actually get carried out. Paul Nutt spent decades studying how organizations decide, across hundreds of real cases, and found that about half of their decisions fail. The failures traced less to weak analysis than to something simpler: the people who had to carry the decision out were never really brought in. Being brought in starts with something basic: knowing what is actually being decided, and who gets to decide it.
This gets more important as our world quickly changes around us. As AI makes output faster and cheaper to produce, it is the human part that will turn decisions into reality: knowing which call is the right one, and getting the people who have to carry it out to buy in. That is the work most of us do every day, often among priorities that pull in different directions and rarely get named out loud.
You cannot reorganize what your environment rewards by yourself. What you can do is build the skills to work inside it with more intention.
The skill that moves things forward
Picture a decision that has been circling for weeks. A few people care about it, each pulling toward a different priority, and every meeting ends in vague agreement and no movement. Someone finally asks the two questions no one has: what are we actually deciding here, and who makes the call? Within ten minutes the fog lifts. Two of them thought it was someone else's decision, and the third had been waiting for permission that was already theirs to give. Nothing about the company changed. One person brought clarity to one decision, and it moved.
A while back I wrote that influence is less about authority than contribution. This is what that can look like up close: the ability to bring clarity to the decision in front of you, helping a group see what they are trying to achieve, what a good outcome looks like, and how the decision will actually get made. Do that, and you have real influence over what happens next, whatever your title and whether or not you are the one in charge. It is a skill, it can be learned, and it compounds. Bring clarity to enough decisions and the system you once looked to leadership to fix becomes one you are moving from within.
It is the kind of skill that grows with structure, a group to practice with, and time, which is what a course is for.
Try This
The next time a decision in your world feels stuck or murky, ask the question almost no one asks out loud: who actually makes this call, and how?
Name it, and make it clear to everyone involved: are you all deciding together, or is one person deciding with everyone's input? Putting that into words removes a surprising amount of the friction that competing priorities create. People stop guessing. The conversation gets shorter and clearer. You will not have fixed the whole system. You will have brought clarity to the one decision in front of you, and that is where your influence lives, even when you are not the one in charge.
What's Next?
Our next course, Decision Making, starts August 25th, and it is built for exactly this: getting clear on the right call and helping the people around you get behind it. Over four live sessions with a small group, you will practice on real decisions from your own work and leave with a toolkit you can use immediately. It runs as a small cohort, so seats are limited. Reserve your seat here.
Looking further out, our course on Big Picture Thinking starts on September 23rd to build the broader skill of seeing and impacting the whole system. More information and booking details are here.
Are you new to the Academy and want a feel for how we work first? Join our free after-work taster on August 13th at 19:00 CEST. Register here.
Skills like these take hold faster when a team builds them together, so if a colleague would get something from this, pass it along.
Thank you to everyone who wrote back last month. Your replies shape what we think about and what we build next. Please keep them coming!
All the best,
Amanda
on behalf of The Novaspex Academy Team