We are often more certain than the evidence really allows.
More quotesBusy is camouflage. A bad idea sitting quietly in a notebook is harmless. Give it an energetic owner, an automation budget and a weekly steering group, and it can waste a quarter before lunch. We are oddly reluctant to challenge this because effort attracts automatic moral credit. The calendar is full. The updates are prompt. Look at all that commitment.
Meanwhile, the person asking “Should this exist?” appears obstructive. No roadmap. No populated tracker. Worst of all, they may delete work—and deleted work leaves no colourful artefact for the quarterly review.
Generative AI makes the distinction savage. A weak premise that once produced one bad advert can now produce fifty polished variants, twelve landing pages and a personalised email sequence before anyone checks whether customers care. Automating a broken process does not create efficiency. It creates high-speed breakage with excellent formatting.
I do not want leaders labelling colleagues clever, stupid, lazy or anything else borrowed from that anecdote. I do want them to stop treating volume as virtue. Reward the person who kills the pointless report, shrinks the campaign until the proposition is tested, or notices that the productive machine is facing a wall.
Ask for evidence before scale. Put checkpoints in front of enthusiasm. Measure useful consequences, not industrious motion. Hard work is admirable only after judgement has pointed it somewhere worth going.