A crisis arrives. The response: form a committee. The committee meets. The committee produces a report. The report recommends further study. Further study is conducted. A second committee is formed to evaluate the findings. The second committee recommends a pilot program. The pilot program is funded, staffed, and scheduled to begin in eighteen months.
The crisis, which did not receive the schedule, continues.
I have watched this process so many times that I can now identify the exact moment when the energy of genuine concern is converted into the machinery of institutional delay. It is the moment someone says: “We need to be thoughtful about this.”
“Thoughtful” is the word institutions use when they mean “slow.” And slow, when the situation demands action, is not wisdom. It is abandonment with better manners.
The Process Trap
I am not against planning. I am against planning as a substitute for action.
There is a specific organizational disease in which the process of deciding what to do becomes so elaborate that it consumes all the energy that should have been directed at doing it. The meetings, the consultations, the stakeholder analyses, the risk assessments, the environmental scans – each individually reasonable, collectively paralyzing.
At Orleans, the French generals had been studying the siege for months. They had maps. They had intelligence. They had plans for plans. What they did not have was a soldier on a horse riding toward the English positions.
I was that soldier. Not because I was smarter. Because I was willing to act while the information was still incomplete, the risk was still real, and the outcome was still uncertain.
That willingness is the difference between a committee and a leader. The committee waits for certainty. The leader acts in its absence.
When Process Is Resistance
I want to name something that is rarely named: in many organizations, the process itself is the resistance.
The people who benefit from the status quo do not need to oppose change directly. They only need to ensure that the process for achieving change is slow enough, complicated enough, and resource-intensive enough that the advocates for change exhaust themselves before the change occurs.
This is not conspiracy. It is institutional gravity. Systems resist their own transformation because the people who operate them have adapted to the current arrangement, and adaptation is comfort, and comfort resists disruption.
The committee is the instrument of this resistance. It gives the appearance of action while ensuring that action does not occur. It absorbs the energy of advocates. It converts urgency into procedure. And it produces, at the end, a document that says what everyone already knew, in language that commits no one to anything.
What to Do Instead
Act. Imperfectly, immediately, visibly.
Do the thing that the committee would have recommended, but do it now, with the resources you have, at whatever scale is possible. The pilot program that starts tomorrow with three people and no budget will produce more change than the program that starts in eighteen months with full funding and a steering committee.
This is not reckless. It is strategic. The small action creates a fact on the ground. The fact on the ground changes the conversation. The conversation changes the politics. And the politics change the outcome.
The committee produces a document. The action produces a result. And results are harder to ignore than recommendations.
The Invitation
You are in an organization. You see a problem. You know what should be done about it. The organization has not done it. The organization has formed a committee, or commissioned a study, or scheduled a meeting, or done any of the hundred things that organizations do instead of doing the thing.
Here is your choice: wait for the committee, or act.
I know what I chose. I was seventeen. The committee – the war council, the generals, the advisors – told me to wait. I did not wait. I rode out.
The siege ended.
What are you waiting for?