You Can’t Scale Confusion

This is the Minute Business Riff (MBR). Quick takes. Big swings. Leadership riffs you can read in less time than it takes to scroll LinkedIn aimlessly.

One minute. One idea. That’s it.

Today’s word count: 290

It took me 1 min 03s to read this.

A COO once told me a story about their growing ops team.

They were scaling fast. New hires every month. New systems, new vendors, new goals - the whole rocket ship thing.

But somewhere around headcount 40, things started to feel... off.

Deadlines slipped. Projects dragged. Teams were stepping on each other’s toes.

Everyone was “busy,” but nothing was actually moving.

So the COO called a meeting.

One slide. One question:

“What’s the #1 priority for this quarter?”

She asked everyone in the room to write it down privately.

They went around the table.

12 people. 9 different answers.

Some said customer onboarding. Others said cost control. A few said product velocity. One guy said “brand tone consistency” - which… yikes.

That’s when it clicked.

The problem wasn’t speed. Or talent. Or effort.

It was clarity.

You can’t scale chaos. You can only scale what people understand.

So they hit pause.

Cancelled half the sprint board. Pulled the exec team into a whiteboard war room.

And realigned around one north star metric, one strategic objective, and one working definition of “done.”

Three days later, the noise dropped.

The team wasn’t less busy - they were just busy on the same thing.

That quarter? Best performance in company history.

Why? Because clarity compounds. When everyone’s rowing in the same direction, you don’t need to paddle harder - you just move faster.

Tactical Takeaway:

This week, ask your team this:

“What are we actually trying to accomplish this quarter - and how do we know when we’ve done it?”

If you get 5 different answers, don’t fix the plan.

Fix the alignment.

Because confusion burns time.

And time is the one resource you don’t get to raise another round of.

Think this was a banger? Think I’m full of it?

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Great leaders are made in minutes. Not meetings.