Horsepower for a Parked Car

When growth stalls, the instinct is to add something. A new initiative, a new hire, a new platform, a new consultancy. More horsepower. But if the handbrake is on, more power just makes more noise, and the organisation ends up busier without going any faster.

I call this “the organisational handbrake”, and in my experience it usually has four parts.

1. 01Unclear decision rights, where nobody can quite say yes but plenty of people can say no.
2. 02Competing incentives, where teams are rewarded for things that pull against each other.
3. 03Capacity already spent keeping the lights on, so any new work has to be squeezed into the gaps.
4. 04A fragmented estate of systems, suppliers and teams, where every change touches everything else.

New initiatives land on top of all this, and the organisation does what stuck organisations do, which is slow everything down to its own speed.

To show what this looks like, take a composite of several merchant services businesses I've seen over the years. It has grown through acquisition, so it runs more than one acquiring platform, each with its own processes and its own loyal team. Sales are paid on new merchants signed, risk is measured on losses avoided, and operations are measured on cost per merchant. Each of those measures is sensible on its own, but together they mean that onboarding a new merchant passes through credit, risk, compliance and operations, taking weeks, while newer competitors do it in minutes.

The business can see the opportunity clearly. Small merchants want payments bundled with the software they use to run their business, and they want to be up and running the same day. So it launches a growth initiative to build exactly that. It's the right idea. But the initiative lands on top of the handbrake. It needs changes to every platform, sign-off from every team and a risk appetite that no one is incentivised to extend. Each team says no for a good reason, and the launch date keeps slipping.

What unsticks a business like this isn't more investment in the initiative. It's releasing the handbrake underneath it: giving one person end-to-end ownership of the merchant journey, making time to onboard a shared measure across sales, risk and operations, choosing one platform for new merchants and stopping investment in the others, and being explicit about who can say yes. In the cases I've seen, that kind of structural change does more for speed than any amount of new capability, because it gives the good ideas somewhere to land.

This is why subtraction, the subject of the last article, so often comes first. The handbrake is hard to see from the top. Boards see missed deadlines and put them down to poor execution, so they add more oversight or more resource, which usually makes things slower. The fixes that work sound dull next to a new growth initiative, and they're easy to defer.

To find your own handbrake, follow a single decision through the organisation and count the people and the weeks it takes. Look for the places where work waits rather than moves. Ask who can say yes to a new idea on their own, and how many people can stop it.