When Momentum Masquerades as Progress

When everything is moving, it’s easy to mistake momentum for progress. Why do some organisations act quickly and what are they missing when understanding comes second?

Most companies don’t suffer from inertia. They suffer from momentum. There’s no shortage of activity; plans are launched, initiatives announced, timelines agreed. From the outside, it does indeed look like progress. From the inside though, it can feel like déjà vu. The same problems return with new labels. The same conversations happen in different rooms. The same decisions are revisited, usually with an uncomfortable sense that this has all happened before.

Action? bucket loads. Understanding? Not so much.

Action is visible. Understanding is not.

You can point at action. Whereas understanding has to be inferred. You can show action in a report to shareholders. You can defend action in a meeting. You can attach names, dates to it. Understanding lives more subtly in nuance, context, and judgment. It doesn’t announce itself loudly. And it rarely fits neatly into a slide. It’s understandable then, that organisations default to what can be seen.

Speed is rewarded.

Decisiveness often looks like competence. The ‘get things done’ mindset is rewarded, after all, those who move quickly are seen as highly capable. Those who pause to ask questions risk being labelled cautious, obstructive, or “over-thinkers”. Over time, this creates a bias towards premature certainty, grabbing at solutions before the problem is properly understood.

The symptoms were obvious. The cause was not.

A large organisation we worked with had noticed a change in how staff were responding to internal communication. Nothing dramatic, no single incident. Just a growing sense that messages weren’t landing and people were out of the loop.

Their response had been swift. The internal communication plan was updated, templates refreshed, and senior leaders quickly committed to more frequent updates. A cadence was agreed and it looked, and felt, like progress but inside the organisation, very little changed.

In fact, in some areas, it felt worse. Staff seemed more weary, as another initiative was layered onto an already crowded landscape.

Had the issue even been the internal communication?

Speaking with staff from a neutral position, outside of internal reporting lines, decision-making structures and politics, allowed conversations to unfold without the usual pressures of justification or alignment. From our external vantage point, with enough distance to see across teams and functions rather than from within any one of them, a pattern became visible that was much harder to spot from inside the organisation.

People weren’t confused by the messages- they understood them clearly. Staff were unsettled by something more subtle; decisions felt inconsistent. Priorities were shifting without explanation. Commitments were made by management then stalled or u-turned. Communication wasn’t failing. It was doing its job well and ironically reflecting the contradictions within the organisation.

The problem wasn’t one of output or cadence, but of coherence and that changed where the attention was needed. Action had arrived early. Understanding came later. Only with that understanding was it clear what kind of action might actually help.

Action feels safe. Understanding feels risky.

Understanding requires sitting with ambiguity, sometimes with uncomfortable truths.

Immediate acting avoids this discomfort. It gives reassurance that something is being done, even when it might not be the right thing. Think of waiting for the outcome of an important medical test. You can’t influence the result, but sitting still with the uncertainty is uncomfortable. So you clean the house, organise paperwork, make lists- anything to feel useful. The activity doesn’t change the outcome, but it soothes the anxiety of waiting. In organisations, action often plays the same role: it feels reassuring, even when it doesn’t address the underlying issue. But tidy action feels tidy doesn't resolve messy problems.

Complex problems don’t become simple because they’re given a neat plan. When action is applied to a poorly understood issue, the result is rarely resolution. More often, it’s displacement. The problem moves on and reappears elsewhere. It comes back wearing different clothes.

Understanding is not the same as analysis.

It's important not to confuse understanding with data. Surveys are run. Metrics gathered. Dashboards reviewed. All useful, but insufficient without good understanding.

What are people emphasising?

What are they avoiding?

What doesn't quite align?

Insight lives as much in conversation as it does in numbers, and paradoxically, understanding can reduce the need for action. Companies that invest in understanding tend to act less but when they do it's more effective.

They intervene more selectively, they explain decisions more clearly and they encounter less resistance, not because everyone agrees, but because people can see the logic.

The cost of acting on partial understanding is always higher than the cost of taking time to see clearly. Effective organisations are rarely the loudest or busiest, they're the ones who understand that action earns its value after understanding, not instead of it.

TL;DR

Organisations often mistake activity for progress, acting quickly because action feels reassuring and visible. But when understanding comes second, problems resurface under new labels and initiatives create fatigue rather than resolution. Real progress comes from taking time to understand what’s actually happening; listening, noticing inconsistencies and making sense of context, so that when action is taken, it’s more selective, coherent and effective.

For a different perspective on action and learning under uncertainty, this Harvard Business School article examines the concept of “failing fast”