BAD MOVES - How Smart Organizations Become Their Own Worst Enemy
The culprit? Not bad people, but BAD MOVES—the acronym for a set of 8 self-defeating systemic patterns that quietly drain momentum, waste energy, and make even smart teams work against themselves.
The worst part? These moves don’t just slow down work—they undermine your strategic objectives. They create friction where there should be alignment and add complexity where simplicity is needed. These subtle failures not only affect day-to-day productivity but also put your organization’s long-term goals at risk.
Here’s how to recognize and eliminate them before they undermine your success.
The 8 BAD MOVES That Derail Execution
B – Bottlenecks & Blockages
When decisions and work get stuck instead of flowing.
Every leader has seen this: a simple topic drags on for weeks, or a project gets held up because a decision needs the input of someone who's too busy. Work slows down, not because of complexity, but because the system relies on gatekeepers instead of clarity. This doesn't merely impact productivity—it costs your precious time and opportunities that can never be recovered.
The Fix: Ask, “How can we get the result without burdening the bottleneck?” When a system can’t run without incessant intervention, it’s not a system—it’s a problem!
A member of our team, who became interim COO for one of our clients, encountered a situation where every decision had to be vetted by the most knowledgeable person on the project. The consequence? Scheduling the meeting calendar of the expert was a full-time job on its own. We simply decided to loop him out, letting him shout at us if someone made a stupid decision. It turned out those moments were rarer than expected, and things moved faster.
A – Analysis Paralysis
Overthinking leads to inaction or missed opportunities.
Indecision is expensive: Teams refine models, debate edge cases, and build reports—while competitors test, learn, and move forward. By the time the perfect answer arrives, the opportunity is already gone. You lose market share, miss partnerships, and erode your competitive edge.
The Fix: Instead of asking, “Is this the right decision?” ask, “Are we good enough to act?” Inaction is the real risk.
As consultants, we were engaged with a client who had a lot of questions regarding a potential technical solution. Our team had the solution finished by the time they had their question catalog. The solution went live, and, ironically - nobody ever read the questions.
D – Dysfunctional Metrics
Teams optimize the wrong things, hurting overall outcomes.
When KPIs become the goal instead of the guide, behavior shifts in unintended ways. Speed targets make teams rush, quality targets make them overcautious. Meanwhile, other critical outcomes—such as customer satisfaction or long-term growth—get sidelined. What appears to be progress is often damage disguised as success.
The Fix: Pressure-test your measurement system by asking, “Someone will game this metric: what will happen?” If the answer makes you uncomfortable, adjust. The right metrics will guide your success, not give you a deceptive sense of comfort.
We worked with many ops teams that were tracked primarily by incident counts. People started redefining incidents as bugs or as new demand—none of that helped the customer. Simply declaring incidents as irrelevant and starting measuring opportunity cost in terms of dev hours lost brought much clearer focus.
M – Motion Without Progress
Lots of activity, no meaningful outcomes.
Being busy feels productive, but in reality, motion is not the same as meaningful movement. More meetings, more reports, and more tasks create the illusion of momentum—yet execution remains stagnant. In an executive role, your responsibility is to drive tangible, high-impact results, not just activity.
The Fix: Cut the noise by asking, “What do we lose by not doing this?” If the answer is, "nothing," you're not making progress—you're playing theater. Be ruthless in eliminating non-value-adding activities.
One of our junior project managers inherited a project just one day before an all-hands organized by the parting PM. The CTO walked in on the meeting and inquired, "This meeting is costing us five figures. What will I get out of it?" This aligned everyone's focus on tangible outcomes. By the end of it, he got a fully revised roadmap, and the team delivered ahead of schedule. It wasn’t just motion—it was focused execution: Not all events are like that.
O – Outdatedness
Past assumptions, structures, or rules no longer serve their purpose.
The market shifts. Technology evolves. Customers change. Yet old policies, workflows, and approval chains remain—costing you flexibility and agility. These outdated practices can lock you into old ways of thinking, and you'll miss opportunities as you fail to adapt to changing conditions.
The Fix: Ask, “Is this how we'd do it on a Green Field?” If not, why are you still doing it? Don’t let legacy processes prevent future growth!
We consulted a company that didn’t have the means to spot predictable fulfillment failures early. We devised a simple web app that would highlight the dangers before they manifested. Customer service loved it, but IT rejected it since it wasn’t built in Java. The result? Instead of focusing on business benefits, the discussion became procedural about standards that didn't create value.
V – Vicious Cycles
Decisions reinforce the problem instead of solving it.
Sometimes, solutions backfire. Tighter approval processes create more delays, which create more oversight, which creates even more delays. Or a company cuts costs so aggressively that morale drops—leading to lower productivity, which triggers even more cost-cutting. This is not just inefficient; it actively undermines your organization’s ability to sustain its market position.
The Fix: Spot negative loops by asking, “Are we preventing the cause, or just treating symptoms?” Be mindful of self-reinforcing cycles that only prolong the pain.
One of our consultants, working as a QC manager, was tracked by how many high-priority defects the team found. As they found more, engineers spent more time fixing issues, deadlines crunched, and we found even more defects. Eventually, we convinced the client to ditch the entire system and put devs and testers into the same team. Software got delivered faster, cheaper and at higher quality. Test management as a dedicated role became obsolete.
E – Execution Gaps
Decisions don’t turn into action—or the wrong actions get taken.
Strategy meetings end with bold commitments, yet weeks later, nothing has changed. This is one of the most frustrating experiences for any leader—when strategic decisions don’t lead to execution. Worse still, the wrong actions—urgent but low-impact tasks—dominate your team's focus while high-value opportunities are left untapped.
The Fix: Before making a decision, ask, “Who cares to make it happen?” Without clear accountability, decisions will remain on paper, not on the ground.
One of our coaches was sitting in the boardroom of a company where every month, strategic moves got proposed and agreed upon. In the boardroom, everything was easy. Nobody ever asked what happened to last month’s initiative—because it was an open secret that nothing ever got finished before the next decision came in. By starting the meeting with a review of the Initiative Kanban and asking for outcomes rather than progress, the gap became obvious.
S – Silo Thinking
Teams act in isolation, harming the overall system.
Departments optimize for their own goals without considering the broader impact. This leads to missed synergies, duplicated efforts, and ultimately less value. Marketing pushes leads that sales can’t close. Engineering builds features that don’t align with customer needs. Finance cuts costs that cripple long-term growth. These siloed actions damage your organization’s cohesion and growth potential.
The Fix: Challenge tunnel vision by asking, “What are the ripple effects?” Effective leaders know that long-term success requires a unified, cross-functional approach.
We were coaching an organization with the classic business-IT conflict: Business wanted features to drive growth, but IT always pushed back to buy time for stabilizing their services. The blame game was the norm until we asked, "If you had a perfect company, what would not be happening?" That simple question changed everything.
BAD MOVES Are Invisible: Until They Aren’t.
None of these issues show up on your balance sheet. They don’t trigger alarms in your reports. And that’s why they persist—until the damage becomes undeniable. By the time you notice, critical projects are already failing, and your organization is caught in a quagmire that makes recovery increasingly difficult with each passing day. It’s only then that the true cost becomes clear: wasted resources, frustrated teams, and eroded competitive advantage. What you see are the symptoms:
- Execution falls behind.
- Opportunities are missed.
- Teams get stuck in hamster wheels.
At that point, you're forced into an unforgiving tradeoff: will you sacrifice short-term success to fix the system, or sacrifice long-term success by pushing forward with an ineffective system?
The best organizations don’t just work hard. They also work smart. They spot and address BAD MOVES before they become habits. Great leaders understand that preventing these systemic issues is key to maintaining long-term success and competitive edge.
Prevent BAD MOVES with VXS Decision
The key to overcoming BAD MOVES is realizing their systemic nature—often caused by conflicting goals, inconsistent actions, or unsuitable metrics. In the complexity of modern organizations, predicting where conflicts might arise can be overwhelming and time-consuming. VXS Decision does this for you: with every goal, action, and metric you're considering, it scans for risks and misalignment, pointing out the critical challenges and conflicts early. Even after BAD MOVES infiltrated your system, VXS Decision flags the impact and identifies levers for change, empowering you to take corrective action before the next issue emerges.
When even the CEO is forced into short-term tradeoffs—choosing between letting critical projects fail or sacrificing long-term growth—the cycle of BAD MOVES becomes self-reinforcing.
VXS Decision disrupts that cycle by providing the clarity and foresight needed to have the right conversations and set a consistent, strategic course. With VXS Decision, your organization stays aligned, agile, and capable of overcoming the systemic obstacles that threaten your success.