Motion isn’t momentum: A test for what your team actually produces

A title confers the authority to choose. It does not confer accurate information about the market.

Customers keep their own scoreboard

Communications leaders often sit closer to that market signal than the executives they advise, which is why their dissent is valuable and why it is so often overruled.

The cost of ignoring it is old and well-documented. A 2005 Bain study found that 80% of companies believed they delivered a superior experience, while just 8% of their customers agreed.

The figure worth tracking is not the leader’s confidence. It is the gap between that confidence and what customers actually report.

The silo makes it worse

Compartmentalized teams widen that gap. When information travels up a single chain and rarely across functions, the leader’s view becomes the organization’s view by default, even when the people closest to customers see something else.

In 2019, decision-making research published by McKinsey found that only about a fifth of organizations rated themselves strong at decision-making, and most leaders considered that much of the time they spend deciding is used poorly. An organization that defers to the loudest title and starves itself of cross-functional dissent learns to accept failure because it has built no mechanism to notice it.

A test you can run this week

Try a one-page audit. List your team’s top five recurring activities, and for each, name the business outcome it is meant to move and the evidence that it does. Any activity that cannot fill that second column is a candidate for elimination, no matter how many hours it consumes.

Then, add a single rule to your decision meetings: Before the senior person states a preference, ask the people closest to the customer to present what the market is telling them, on the record. Naming the dynamic out loud and doing it with respect changes the room. It separates the authority to decide from the question of which decision the evidence supports.

None of this is an argument against speed or instinct. Experienced leaders earn the right to trust their judgment, and McKinsey found that fast decision-makers were about twice as likely to report high-quality outcomes as their slower peers.

The point is narrower and more practical: Stop letting motion stand in for momentum, and stop letting the highest-paid opinion override what the market is plainly saying. Teams that separate the two spend less energy looking productive and far less effort defending work that produces nothing.

So, ask your own team a blunt question this week: If you deleted every activity that cannot name the result it produces, how much of the calendar would survive?