Tuesday Email: It’s About Rethinking, not Adding

Happy Tuesday!

Every Tuesday I'd like to offer strategies for the week ahead and a thought to fuel your action.

I was sitting in a conference room when someone finally said it out loud: "We're experiencing change fatigue."

My first instinct was to push back. We're not changing too much. We're evolving. We're innovating. But something in the way the room went quiet made me pause.

And in that pause, I realized they were right—just not in the way I thought.

We've been taught that resistance to change is the enemy.

That if people are tired, it's because we're moving too fast, asking too much, disrupting the comfortable rhythms of "how we've always done it."

But what if the exhaustion isn't from the change itself?

What if it's from something we rarely talk about: the suffocating weight of unfinished change?

A year earlier, I had championed moving our team from server-based storage to the cloud.

The case was obvious—easier access, better integration, lower costs. We picked the platform, assembled a task force, and did the training.

And then I moved on to the next idea.

In my mind, the hard part was done. I had identified the problem, found the solution, and secured buy-in. The rest was just execution—someone else's execution.

Twelve months later, we were living in limbo.

Half our files are in the cloud, half on the server. Some people are using the new system, others are clinging to the old. Every project required explaining which system to use. Every new hire needed two sets of instructions.

We hadn't adopted a new tool. We'd just added confusion to the old way.

And as I pushed for the next innovation, I couldn't understand why people seemed so... drained.

"Change fatigue," they said.

But they weren't tired of change. They were tired of me.

Specifically, they were exhausted by my pattern: brilliant idea, incomplete follow-through, onto the next thing.

I was an arsonist who kept lighting fires and walking away, genuinely confused about why everything smelled like smoke.

Here's what nobody tells you about tools and innovation: the tool is rarely the problem. Your process is.

We worship at the altar of the quick fix.

A new app will make us more productive.

A new framework will clarify our strategy.

A new platform will solve our communication issues.

It's like buying expensive running shoes and expecting them to train you for a marathon. The shoes might reduce friction, but they can't build your endurance or teach you proper form.

The cloud storage wasn't failing us because it was the wrong choice.

It was failing because I never built the process to make it succeed. I confused having an idea with doing the work.

The truth that changed everything for me: Implementation isn't the boring part after strategy. Implementation IS the strategy.

When we say we don't have time to properly finish what we start, what we're really saying is we don't have time to actually solve our problems. We only have time to appear to solve them.

But here's the paradox: that unfinished middle ground—where the new tool sits awkwardly atop the old process—is where we lose the most time.

The team isn't dividing their attention between old and new; they're multiplying their effort because nothing works cleanly.

You know this feeling.

You've implemented a new system that was supposed to make everything easier, but somehow it's made everything harder. Not because the system was bad, but because the old process didn't die—it just went underground.

So what actually works?

The cloud storage story has a better ending. After that meeting, I did something uncomfortable: I stayed.

Not just physically, but mentally. I dedicated time to figuring out what was needed to finish what we started.

I pushed deadlines to remove access to the old server (yes, we had to do that). I gathered info from listening sessions. And set out a strategy to listen to our team, provide them with solutions, and push them towards opportunities they hadn't yet seen.

It took three months of unglamorous, tedious, repetitive work.

But at the end, we had something we didn't have before: actual change, not theoretical change.

And something unexpected happened. We built a better process for our next innovation.

Because the team learned something more valuable than any tool: that when we start something, we finish it.

Here's what I wish I'd known earlier:

Your team doesn't need another tool. They need you to stay with the last one until it works.

The next time you're facing a challenge, before you search for the solution, ask yourself: Am I looking for a new tool because the old approach doesn't work, or because I never fully committed to making it work?

The answer matters.

Because the exhaustion everyone feels?

It doesn't come from doing hard things. It comes from doing things halfway.

Think about this:

When was the last time you had 60 uninterrupted minutes to think—not about what new thing to add, but about what unfinished thing is quietly draining your team?

What if the most innovative thing you could do isn't to find the next solution, but to finally complete the last one?

Change isn't exhausting. Incomplete change is.

And the only person who can finish what you started is you.

The best is ahead!

-Matt