Mark Emdin
August 2026
There is a pattern I have come to recognise quickly when I start working with a new organisation, and it is captured in a single word. Ask almost anyone how they are, and the answer is the same: busy. Not “good”, not “fine”. Busy — said not as a complaint but as a statement of fact, a reflection of organisational life.
Most conversations about organisational busyness end up in the same place: culture. For leaders everything is both important and urgent as seen by ever shorter meetings. There is enough truth in that diagnosis to make it stick. But I think it is also incomplete, and acting on it alone tends to produce the wrong solutions. Mindfulness programmes, calendar audits, meeting free Fridays — these treat the symptom, not the cause.
The more important causes of organisational busyness are a blend of culture and structure. And until we treat them as such, the problem doesn’t get solved, it simply gets managed, temporarily, by the most disciplined people in the room.
The hit is real
Before making that argument, I have a confession. Speed, the friend of busyness, feels good. Fast decisions feel decisive. The organisation in constant motion looks like an organisation going somewhere. And the evidence that pace produces competitive advantage is genuine; rapid iteration, short feedback loops and fast resource reallocation have real results in real markets. Any argument that ignores this isn’t honest.
But there is a difference between an organisation that can move fast and one that cannot slow down. The first is a capability. The second is a dependency. And like most dependencies, it develops gradually, through choices that each seemed reasonable at the time, until the ability to choose pace has quietly disappeared.
This is the addiction of speed. Busyness is its most visible symptom. It is the word people reach for when you ask them honestly how work feels. But the dependency is on pace, not activity. Create space in the system and watch what happens as anxiety fills it. The instinct to schedule, to produce, to demonstrate momentum, to do stuff! Organisations that have lost the ability, and agency to slow down cannot simply decide to recover it. The system resists slowing down.
The structural cause of busyness we underestimate
When roles are poorly defined and accountabilities are ambiguous, work migrates. It moves or is sucked upward because people lower in the organisation are not given the authority to act. It moves sideways as teams absorb tasks that nominally belong elsewhere. The result is leaders doing work that should sit two levels below them, and teams carrying a coordination burden that should have been designed out. And we know that the coordination mechanisms – governance boards, cross functional meetings etc – all add cost to organisations.
Elliott Jaques’ concept of requisite organisation captures this precisely: when roles aren’t sized to the complexity of the decisions they’re expected to hold, the system generates overload as a structural feature, not an accident.[i] The busyness isn’t incidental. It is what poorly designed organisations produce.
This matters because it changes what a useful response looks like. If pace is partly a design failure, if busyness is the symptom of work not sitting where it should, then the intervention is structural. Asking leaders to protect thinking time while leaving the underlying design unchanged is asking them to treat a symptom. It rarely holds.
What busyness and pace quietly consume
Busyness distributes its costs unevenly, and the costs are easy to miss until they compound.
The things that move quickly are transactions, decisions, communications. All measurable, completable, visible. The things that quietly suffer are slower and less legible: trust, genuine learning, the cultural integration that has to follow significant change. An organisation can look impressively dynamic while its actual capacity to think, adapt and relate is degrading beneath the surface.
There is also a relational cost. Psychological safety, honest dissent, conflict competence, the kind of trust that allows difficult things to be said. These don’t emerge in twenty minutes, or a 2-hour set piece workshop. They require unhurried conversation, where people have time to think and reflect before they speak, to hold back on forming opinions too quickly and inquire of others[ii]. To ask for help in a safe environment. The drift toward shorter meetings is not inherently wrong. There is real discipline in a focused agenda. But when short becomes the only available format, certain kinds of work become structurally impossible, not just inconvenient. That is a process design choice, even when it doesn’t feel like one.
AI is sharpening this
I’ve written separately about why deliberately introducing friction into how we use AI at work might be one of the more consequential design choices available to leaders right now.[iii] The point relevant here is specific: AI removes the natural pauses that used to force reflection. Drafting took time. Searching took time. Seeking out feedback and for a response took time. That friction was doing work we didn’t fully appreciate — slowing things down just enough for a doubt to surface, a better question to form, a judgment to develop. As that friction disappears, the already compressed space for slow thinking gets compressed further. The seduction of speed has found a powerful new ally.
A story from the field
A leadership team asked me to help them redesign a critical part of their engineering business. Not the whole organisation, but a group that sat at the heart of how the business functioned. As we scoped the work it became clear that three days felt like an uncomfortable commitment. There were other priorities and calendars full. And, though it took longer to surface, there was a shared awareness that the work had been postponed precisely because it would require conversations people had been avoiding. Someone said, with some candour, that three days would give old disagreements too much room to breathe.
We agreed on two days, with a commitment to review whether a third was needed.
What happened across those two days was not comfortable. Assumptions that had hardened over time got examined. Stories people had been telling themselves about each other — stories that had quietly shaped decisions and relationships for years — turned out not to hold. That….takes…..time.
Late on the afternoon of day two, one of the quieter members of the team said something that stopped the room. “We have come so far already. We need to come back tomorrow and finish the job. It’s our job as leaders to do that.”
Nobody disagreed and the third day happened. The team left with a design they had genuinely built together and could own. It was not a compromise, but something that carried the full weight of having been properly, and slowly, worked through.
I had to work hard, in the early scoping conversations, not to be drawn into the team’s own urgency. The pressure to compress was real and it was well-intentioned. But the work required the pace it required. That is not always three days. Sometimes it is an hour.
What this means for Executive Leaders
The first question is diagnostic. When did you last deliberately slow something down; a decision, a conversation, a process and did the organisation let you? Not as a reflection on personal discipline, but as a signal about what the system allows. If slowing down feels professionally risky, that is important information about the culture you are leading. Equally, how do you react when others ask to slow things down?
The second is about conscious design. Every calendar norm, every meeting format and agenda design, every response-time expectation signals what kinds of thinking are valued. Designing for pace means designing explicitly for different speed, knowing what needs to move fast, and actively protecting the conditions for what doesn’t. These are structural choices, and belong in the same conversation as operating model design and role clarity.
The third is about where work is actually sitting. If your leadership team is consistently overwhelmed, the answer may not be better prioritisation but about how you have designed the work of your team. It may be that the organisation hasn’t been designed to hold work at the right level. That is a solvable problem but it requires looking at structure and accountability rather than individual behaviour.
Finally, have you succumbed to the often misquoted adage “if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it”.
Pace is not something that happens to organisations. Neither is busyness. Both are the product of choices made consciously or by accumulated default. Left unexamined, it becomes something closer to a habit nobody remembers choosing. The difference is a design question, and it is worth asking deliberately, before the system answers it for you.
