Motion, and progress

There is a specific failure mode that does not look like failure at any point while it is happening. Work is produced. Deadlines are met. Meetings end with decisions. Every individual step is defensible on its own terms. And the operation is in the same place it was a year ago.

Call it the Mill. It is not laziness and it is not incompetence, and the people inside it are usually working harder than the people who are not. That is what makes it so hard to name: every available signal says things are going well, because every available signal is measuring the walking rather than the arriving.

The Mill has a structural cause. Loops are self-reinforcing because they generate their own evidence. A weekly review that reviews the outputs of last week's decisions will always find that decisions were made and outputs produced. It cannot find that the sequence of weeks is circular, because it never looks at the sequence.

The three lessons that follow are the ways out. The first is understanding why the loop is invisible from inside, which is not a failure of attention. The second is the tell that gives it away. The third is the count that makes it undeniable.