Death by a Thousand Yeses

A few weeks ago, I was heading to the airport in Phoenix after a CEO event. I said to the CEO I was with,

“One of the things that is shocking to me is the lack of organizational discipline throughout the sector. In a big organization, it seems like it just like snowballs—accretes—like barnacles. It's let one thing go, and then another, and another. And then those things glom on.”

These barnacles can be programs, events, partnerships, reports, and even roles. No one intentionally chooses them. They just arrive and stick…forever.

This led me to do a bit of research on barnacles. They attach one at a time, small, and invisible from the deck. But they compound, because a spot where one survived attracts the next, and the next, and the next.

A bunch of barnacles can increase a ship's fuel consumption by as much as 40%. The ship still moves. It just burns far more fuel to go the same distance, and the crew can't feel the decline because it happened so gradually.

On this week’s episode of The Nonprofit CEO Podcast, Ted Esler from Missio Nexus mentioned this phenomenon in his own leadership: 

"I'm an idea generator. I generate a ton of stuff that has to be pulled along. I create programs. I'm great at creating stuff. I'm not so great at the follow through and the evaluation later on. So that generates barnacles that slows the ship down over time."

I told the CEO on our way to PHX, “You end up with discipline debt, just like you have technical debt in IT from delayed investment in that area.” Every small thing you tolerate today becomes a painful, expensive problem later. Even simple little things get snarled up (and expensive).

I went back to the other 250+ conversations with other CEOs I’ve had over the last couple of years. I found a fascinating arc of conversations related to this: