# The speed trap _The skills that made you effective as a manager start working against you as a leader._ --- Monday morning. You open your laptop to fourteen Slack messages, three escalations, and a calendar that's already full by 10am. By lunchtime you've unblocked a hiring decision, chased a late invoice, jumped into a product review, and talked a client through a contract question. You close the laptop at seven feeling spent but productive. You moved things. People saw you move them. Tuesday looks the same. So does Wednesday. --- Most organisations run on loops. Sales cycles, product roadmaps, hiring funnels. Inside the loop, action feels urgent and rewarding. You chase late invoices, push a release, approve headcount, and the feedback is instant, visible, gratifying. Step outside and the view changes. Why do invoices stall? What shapes release cadence? How does information really move between teams? These are the questions that bend the whole system, the kind that reshape [[Designing the organisation|how the organisation actually works]], not just this week's results. Stepping outside feels slower. It looks like less work. Your instincts scream to jump back in and fix things. But firefighting buys relief; system work builds resilience. The first feels good. The second endures. --- The same reflex operates with pressure from above. Picture this: the board flags declining gross margins at the quarterly review. Your CEO leaves the meeting tense. By Friday afternoon she's forwarded the board pack to three VPs with a note that says "need answers on this." Each VP calls a Monday all-hands. By Tuesday, forty people across the company are pulling data, running analyses, and rescheduling their week around a problem none of them fully understands yet, because nobody paused to translate the board's concern into a specific question the teams could act on. The margin decline might be a mix shift, a pricing lag, or a one-off supplier cost that already corrected. It doesn't matter. The anxiety arrived before the diagnosis, and now the organisation is burning hundreds of hours generating reassurance, not insight. Two weeks later, a deck goes back to the board that says roughly what the finance team could have said in an afternoon, had anyone asked them directly. What travelled through the company was anxiety, not direction. The team felt the pressure without knowing what to do with it. The mature move is harder: absorb the heat, work out what actually needs to change, and come back with a clear ask. If you can't say it in one sentence, you're not ready to share it. --- Most managers stay in the loop because that's where the dopamine is, the fires and the urgency and the visible wins all wrapped together. Leadership means holding your distance long enough to see why the same fires keep starting. Not what the numbers say this month, but how the system produces them in the first place. Staying close enough to feel the heat whilst holding far enough to redesign what's breaking is the real discipline. The loop still needs you occasionally. The system needs you more. --- When your team escalates a decision to you, ask why it reached you at all. When a project slips, trace back to whatever made the timeline plausible in the first place, because the slip usually started there, not at the deadline. And when someone says "this is how we've always done it", ask what would have to change to do it differently. These questions feel slow. They don't resolve the immediate problem. But they surface the structural issues that keep creating problems. Each time you ask them, you're practising stepping outside the loop whilst staying connected to reality. --- The same applies to problem-solving. The more expertise you have, the faster you see the answer. But every time you solve a problem someone else could have solved, you've saved time today and created dependency tomorrow. Look at your calendar this week. How much time is spent inside the loop, reacting, approving, unblocking? How much is spent outside, asking why, redesigning processes, changing the conditions that create the work? If it's all inside, you're managing. Leadership happens when you step out long enough to see the pattern, then change it. ---