Richard’s screen share flickered, a universe of charts no one had asked for. The line graph for ‘Synergistic Engagement Velocity’ was an aggressive shade of teal and trending, alarmingly, sideways. Twelve faces, pixelated into expressions of polite concentration, stared back at him. This was the fourth meeting this month about the Phoenix Dashboard, a piece of software that cost the company a little over $2.2 million. The purpose of this meeting, Richard announced, was to schedule a workshop to define the key performance indicators we would need to understand the data presented in the dashboard.

I took a sip of lukewarm coffee and looked out the window. It’s a strange feeling to be in a multi-million dollar speedboat that’s going in circles. We weren’t moving faster. We weren’t smarter. We had just built a very expensive, very digital room to have the same old meetings in. We were paying for the illusion of progress, a subscription to the feeling of momentum. It’s the corporate equivalent of repeatedly opening the fridge, hoping something new and exciting has materialized since you last looked 22 minutes ago. Nothing has, but the act of looking feels like a step towards a solution.

The core of this paralysis isn’t technological; it’s almost spiritual. We buy technology as an absolution for our lack of clarity. We believe the software holds a secret, a process embedded in its code that will magically fix our disorganized, human mess. It won’t. Technology is an amplifier. It takes what you are and makes you more of it, faster. If you have a clear, effective process, new software will make it beautifully efficient. If you have a chaotic, broken process, new software will help you generate chaos at an unprecedented scale.

The Marble Test

I think about Cora Y. I met her years ago. Her official title was something dull, like Senior Comfort Analyst, but her job was to test mattress firmness. She spent her days with strangely calibrated instruments, dropping weighted spheres and measuring indentation. But she told me her most valuable tool was a simple marble. She’d place it on the mattress and see which way it rolled. “The expensive sensors give me 42 pages of data,” she said, “but the marble tells me if the sleeper will spend all night rolling into a rut in the middle.”

She wasn’t anti-technology. She used the sensors. But she understood that the tool’s purpose was to serve a fundamental question: will this help someone sleep? The companies buying the Phoenix Dashboard haven’t figured out their marble question yet. They’re measuring every possible indentation without knowing if they’re even trying to prevent a person from rolling to the middle. The dashboard, with its 232 customizable widgets, becomes the obsession itself. The goal shifts from solving the business problem to understanding the tool that was meant to solve the business problem.

It’s a solution looking for a problem.

The Personal “Extra Chore”

I’ll admit, I’ve been the problem. A decade ago, I was the champion for a new project management platform. I was convinced it would change everything. I spent 12 weeks configuring it, creating intricate workflows and 72 different custom ticket types. I made beautiful Gantt charts. I held training sessions. And what happened? The team nodded, said all the right things, and then continued managing their projects in a shared spreadsheet. The expensive platform became a glorified bulletin board where people posted a link to the

real

work. I hadn’t solved their problem. I had given them an extra chore. My beautiful system wasn’t better than their simple one, because their simple one worked and mine required a 92-minute orientation video.

This isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about organizational gravity. People and processes will always bend toward the simplest path that works. Your job as a leader isn’t to build a complex, perfect highway system that nobody wants to use. It’s to find the worn path in the grass and pave it. People want the path of least resistance. They’ll find the most direct way to get what they need, like a player looking for the gclub ทางเข้า ล่าสุด instead of navigating a bloated corporate portal with three-factor authentication. You can build a cathedral of a system, but if the side door is easier, that’s where the footprints will be.

The Cargo Cult of Digital Transformation

The entire digital transformation industry is often built on a cargo cult mentality. During World War II, islanders in the Pacific saw military cargo planes land with supplies. After the war, the planes stopped coming. So, some islanders built replica runways, bamboo control towers, and wooden airplanes, hoping to summon the planes back. They were perfectly mimicking the form, but they had missed the underlying principle entirely.

This is what we’re doing. We see successful, data-driven companies using slick dashboards and integrated software suites. So we buy the dashboards. We buy the software. We build the bamboo control tower and wait for the cargo of insight to land. But it never does, because we’ve mistaken the artifact of their success for the cause of it. Their success didn’t come from the dashboard; the dashboard came from a culture that was already relentlessly focused on asking the right questions. The tool was a consequence of their clarity, not the source of it.

The Hall of Mirrors

So we sit in our Zoom call, discussing the data about our lack of engagement with the data. It’s almost comical. We have analytics telling us that no one is looking at the analytics. We generate reports on who has viewed the reports. It’s a hall of mirrors, and we’re paying by the reflection.

I find myself going off on tangents about things like this. It’s like the satisfying weight of a well-made mechanical pencil. We can admire the craftsmanship, the precision of the engineering, the satisfying click of the mechanism. But owning a great pencil doesn’t make you a great writer. It just means you have a nice tool. And that’s what’s happening with our business tools. We’re all sitting around admiring the pencil.

The Free Solution: Clear Thinking

Breaking this cycle doesn’t require another $2 million. It requires the courage to ask a terrifyingly simple question: What problem are we actually trying to solve? And a follow-up: What is the simplest, most direct way to solve it, even if it’s a shared spreadsheet or a conversation? Often, the answer is so un-technological, so mundane, that it feels embarrassing. We’ve been conditioned to believe that expensive problems require expensive solutions. They rarely do. They require clear thinking, which is free.

The real transformation happens when you stop trying to install software and start trying to install a new question in everyone’s mind. For Cora, it was “Will they roll to the middle?” For a sales team, it might be “How can we have 2 more meaningful conversations a day?” Not “How can we optimize our CRM data-entry compliance?” One question leads to action; the other leads to another meeting about software.

Stop buying answers. Stop buying dashboards and platforms and ecosystems hoping they contain a secret map. They don’t. The map is sketched out in conversations, in frustrations, in the messy reality of the work itself. Find that worn path in the grass. See where people are already going. Then, and only then, think about paving it.