You know the corporate drill. A massive, strategic project is launched with huge fanfare. The executive sponsors give a rousing town hall speech, the kickoff slides are a masterpiece of modern design, and everyone agrees that this initiative will finally revolutionize the way we work. And then, week three arrives.
When the project team actually tries to execute, they crawl out of the boardroom and straight into the trenches of the organization’s normal operating model. Suddenly, every request for cross-functional help is met with the exact same corporate forcefield:
- Yeah, that’s not in our current sprint.
- We don’t have the capacity for that right now.
- Drop a ticket in Jira and we’ll prioritize it against the backlog sometime in Q4.
To the project team, it feels maddening. It feels like different departments are stubbornly protecting their own turf, hiding behind their backlogs, and flat-out refusing to help regardless of how tiny the request is.
But are these operational teams just being difficult? Are they lazy or actively trying to sabotage the project?
Absolutely not. The core problem isn’t the people. The core problem is a lethal, almost comical misalignment of organizational incentives.
The Vertical Reality vs. The Horizontal Dream
Large organizations typically operate on a vertical power structure. Budgets, reporting lines, and most importantly, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) flow top-down within specific departments. This structure is designed to run the business efficiently.
But a strategic project is horizontal. It is designed to change the business, which means it has to cut across those vertical silos and beg, borrow, or steal resources from them.
Here is where the friction originates: We launch horizontal projects, but we leave the vertical incentives completely intact. If a department lead’s bonus, performance review, and psychological safety depend solely on clearing their specific backlog and hitting their local KPIs, any request from your project is an active threat to their survival.
When an employee looks you in the eye and says no to a five-minute task, they aren’t being stubborn. They are behaving entirely rationally. To the project team, that employee looks like a roadblock. But to their line manager, they look completely focused.
The Science of Please Leave Me Alone
If you think this is just anecdotal, the research backs it up. We are currently living through what organizational network researchers, like Rob Cross (writing in the Harvard Business Review), call the crisis of collaborative overload. Over the past decade, the time employees spend in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more.
People are drowning in their day jobs. When a project manager skips over to a developer’s desk asking for a tiny favor, it isn’t just one favor, it is the fourteenth undocumented, ad-hoc, super quick request that employee has received that week. They hide behind their backlogs because it is their only defense mechanism against total burnout.
The Breakroom Poster Delusion
When the project inevitably stalls, leadership usually misdiagnoses the problem. They buy posters with people rowing boats, hold another town hall urging everyone to break down silos, and tell their teams they just need to collaborate more.
But as quality management pioneer W. Edwards Deming famously taught us: a bad system will beat a good person every time. You cannot overcome conflicting KPIs with motivational speeches. You cannot unblock delivery if the operating model actively rewards people for staying in their lanes.
The Act Like an Owner Illusion
To bypass this friction, leadership often plays its final card: they demand that employees act like owners and show more entrepreneurial spirit.
When individual people take true ownership, the difference is staggering. True intrapreneurs don’t look at a horizontal project and say, ‘That’s not in my backlog.’ They look at the overall value chain and ask, What does the business actually need to succeed? They naturally cut across silos. They bypass bureaucratic red tape and focus obsessively on the shipped outcome rather than the process metric.
But here is the critical catch: You cannot demand entrepreneurial ownership in a system that punishes it. If an employee acts like an owner stepping outside their vertical lane to rescue a struggling strategic project but then gets a poor performance review because they missed a localized KPI, the system has just killed an entrepreneur. If you want the massive benefits of individual ownership, you have to build an environment where caring about the whole business is actually rewarded.
How to Actually Unblock the Operating Model
If you want to run a strategic project alongside your normal operations, you cannot rely on motivational speeches. You have to structurally redesign the system to remove the friction.
1. Align the Reward Architecture to Horizontal Flow. You cannot demand horizontal execution while paying for vertical compliance. You must officially tie operational performance metrics to cross-functional project throughput. If a local department head is implicitly penalized for shifting their team’s capacity toward a strategic initiative, your operating model is actively sabotaging your strategy.
2. Govern Capacity, Not Just the Budget. Approving a project budget is easy; creating actual organizational bandwidth is hard. A system running at 100% operational utilization has zero flow for change. Seasoned leaders manage enterprise Work-In-Progress (WIP) limits. They explicitly deprioritize parts of the operational baseline to create the necessary strategic capacity. If you don’t adjust the baseline, you aren’t managing a transformation; you are just engineering a traffic jam.
3. Elevate Friction to the Executive Cadence. The conflict between Run the Business and Change the Business is a strategic tension. It should never be left to project managers and operational leads to fight over in the trenches. Leadership must build a governance topology where resource contention is rapidly escalated and resolved at the portfolio level by the executives paid to make zero-sum trade-offs.
4. Stop Funding Corporate Groundhog Day. We have all seen this happen: a massive project is forced across the finish line through sheer executive willpower, but the underlying processes and ways of working are never actually redesigned. What happens? The minute the project team disbands, the organization’s immune system rejects the change. Within twelve months, the exact same problem lands on someone else’s desk, and a brand-new project manager is hired to kick off the exact same work under a new acronym that has, in the worst cases, already failed three times. If you don’t redesign the actual operating model from the ground up, you aren’t leading a transformation; you are just renting a temporary outcome.
Don’t let the bad system beat a good strategic transformation
Friction in a project isn’t a sign that your people don’t want to work together. It’s a flashing red light that your operating model and your strategic priorities are at war with each other.
If you want the project to actually ship and stay shipped, stop fighting the backlogs, and start fixing the system.
