_The bottleneck is finishing, not starting._ --- ## The starting bias Leaders optimise for starting. New ideas feel like progress. Sharing the next initiative, launching the next project, kicking off the next piece of work — it looks like momentum. It feels decisive. It's visible. You can point to it in a meeting and say "we're moving." But the bottleneck isn't generating ideas. It's finishing them. Start ten things and finish two, you learn less than starting three and finishing three. The maths is simple. But starting feels productive. Finishing is slower, less visible, harder to showcase. This creates a pattern. Leaders share the next idea while the last few are still working through design, delivery, or debate. From the outside it looks creative, energetic, fast-moving. Inside, everyone is sprinting but nothing is crossing the line. --- ## What fragmentation looks like Every team has a limit to how much new work it can absorb. Push past it and momentum doesn't build — it fragments. Half-finished projects pile up. Priorities blur. Context switching burns time that should go to execution. People work longer hours but less gets done. The system is fighting them. Manufacturing learned this long ago. Feed material into a line faster than it can be processed and the line slows. Knowledge work is the same, only the raw material changed — ideas, requests, initiatives. Arrive too quickly and the system clogs. The instinct when this happens is to work harder. Run faster. Push through. But the problem isn't effort. It's overload. The system solution is to stop starting until something finishes. --- ## The discipline The shift is to treat finishing as the metric, not starting. This is harder than it sounds. Starting is visible and feels like action. Finishing is often invisible — a feature that quietly ships, a project that closes out, a decision that finally gets made. No fanfare, just done. But finishing is where value lives. Nothing compounds until work is complete. A half-built feature teaches you nothing. A shipped feature teaches you whether customers care. The discipline is to separate capture from release. Write ideas down so you don't lose them, but don't put them into flight. A backlog, a parking lot, a roadmap — somewhere ideas can wait until there's capacity to execute. Capturing an idea doesn't mean starting it. Then limit what's in progress. Set a number that matches team capacity — three active initiatives, five projects in delivery, whatever fits. When something new needs to start, something else needs to pause or finish. The constraint is deliberate. It's what creates flow. --- ## The test Count what you've started in the last quarter versus what you've finished. If the ratio is worse than 2:1, you're overloading. Most teams, when they first do this count, are surprised. They're launching five things for every one they complete. That's not execution. It's churn. Pick one active initiative to pause. Don't start the next thing until something finishes. Track cycle time — how long from start to done. Most teams see it drop immediately. Not because people work harder, but because the system stops fighting them. Real speed comes from finishing, not starting. --- **Related:** [[Notes/Expensive Yes|Expensive Yes]] · [[Notes/Variety Kills Flow|Variety Kills Flow]] **See also:** [[Ideas/Little's Law|Little's Law]]