Stop Starting, Start Finishing
Leaders optimise for starting. New ideas feel like progress - sharing the next initiative, launching the next project, kicking off the next piece of work. But the bottleneck isn’t generating ideas, it’s finishing them. Teams fragment when work arrives faster than they can process it.
The maths is simple: more items in flight means longer cycle time. Start ten things and finish two, you learn less than starting three and finishing three. But starting feels productive. Finishing is slower, less visible, harder to showcase.
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, blurred priorities, rising friction. Leaders share the next idea whilst the last few are still working through design, delivery, or debate. From the outside it looks creative. Inside it’s idea diarrhoea - a well-intentioned flood that leaves everyone sprinting, no one finishing.
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.
What Good Leaders Do
Separate capture from release. Write ideas down so you don’t lose them, but don’t immediately put them into flight. Separate thinking time from release time. Capturing an idea doesn’t mean starting it.
Limit work-in-progress explicitly. Set a number - three active initiatives, five projects in delivery, whatever matches team capacity - and enforce it. When something new needs to start, something else needs to pause or finish.
Measure completions, not starts. Track what finishes, not what begins. Completion rate is the signal. Starts are just motion.
The Test
Count what you’ve started in the last quarter vs what you’ve finished. If the ratio is worse than 2:1, you’re overloading. 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 they work harder, but because the system stops fighting them. Real speed comes from finishing, not starting.
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