It’s time to call out an important issue – in business transformation, action is meaningless without a guiding principle.
There is no shortage of leaders who want action, but who is to say that teams are not already taking action? Many modernization efforts continue to face the same struggle: they act faster, yet achieve very little. This is a situation that deserves more attention.
Being action-oriented might work for simpler, routine tasks, but would more actions allow you to build a bridge? Can acting faster and more efficiently build more bridges? No. You will struggle without foundational knowledge. When engineers design blueprints that indicate what to do, those designs are based on principles. They are built on reasons for why things are done in a specific way.
Laundry lists versus guiding principles
Too many people begin with a laundry list of actions rather than principles. All they are doing is throwing darts randomly in all directions, hoping one lands on the target. Performing a million actions is meaningless without a guiding principle.
While critics are quick to point out the repetitive jobs that should be automated by artificial intelligence (AI), few have considered what made those work environments obsolete in the first place. Call centers are probably the most action-oriented workplaces.
Call centers look busy working around the clock, yet their efficiency amounts to little compared to what AI can handle. It’s expected that AI will have the ability to replace 60 percent of Australian customer calls by 2027. Controlling every word, movement, and phone call is meant to boost efficiency, but how many calls can they realistically take in a day?
When actions lack principles
The real issue is that most departments resemble call centers in their quest to be action-oriented. They end up acting without guiding principles. They move fast but make little progress. An analogy would be the beetle stuck on its back, waving its legs everywhere, trying to get up.
Actions cannot be performed just for the sake of looking busy. They must be evaluated, not just once, but repeatedly, so that each action aligns with the principle the organization is trying to achieve.
Being efficient at manual work is no longer the game. From the beetle’s perspective, it might even consider itself efficient – it is efficiently grabbing at the air. The beetle has plenty of actions (waving its legs) but lacks a guiding principle (grabbing onto a branch). Like the beetle stuck on its back, managers who obsess over efficiency must ask:
- What is the significance of shaving off 30 seconds?
- How do more reports, policies, and procedures enable growth outside the organization?
Even if we optimized every worker, all we would get are more actions without improvements to the business model. If each call center produced one more report or shaved off 10 seconds, it would never reach the scale of an automated chatbot or AI system. People are working harder and contributing less. The concern is not simply about AI replacing certain jobs, but why those jobs are being replaced. Demanding that a department act faster only encourages more actions, not necessarily better results.
Register for All Access: Business Transformation 2026!
The DOGE lesson
Another example is bureaucracy. We often think bureaucracy is simply red tape, paperwork, and endless approvals. Earlier in 2025, Elon Musk famously launched DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency). Although DOGE leaders did not achieve their targets, they did uncover an important issue that many resonated with: more is not better.
Consider how many organizations claim to have a new digital portal, but really just have shared drives full of outdated PDFs. If all they did was move messy PDFs into another folder, then not much has changed. The number of PDFs continues to grow and overload teams. They may have acted quickly, but those actions rested on the assumption that more is better. By acting without principles, all this does is reinforce the very bureaucracies that frustrate people.
The issue is not the ability to act. The issue is when someone acts without the ability to stop and reflect. Organizations that do this fall victim to the belief that every feature is beneficial. A department that acts without a guiding principle may believe that an expensive database cataloguing every decision, conversation, and minor event is what’s needed. To avoid being trapped in a vicious cycle where ‘everything must be added,’ they must reevaluate whether their actions are guided by the right principles.
Being fast is not the same as being good
Effective action is not about making the ‘to-do’ list longer or completing it faster. People who love adding to their to-do lists often believe that being fast is the same as being good. That may be the principle they have come to accept and pass on. They spend their time transcribing conversations or assembling decks no one reads, but if all you are doing is recording what someone else said verbatim, your actions have little value. You are not analyzing – you are parroting.
Although it’s not expected that every action is anchored in a solid principle, it is expected that actions generate new understanding. People who pride themselves on being fast and compliant should also be asking:
- So what?
- What’s new here?
- What have I learned from my last action?
Without asking the right questions, work becomes an endless cycle of meetings, reports, and frustration. Even selling to customers can dissolve into a list of random actions. Look closely at daily tasks: recording meeting notes, updating spreadsheets, generating reports, chasing updates. The actions continue, but not all are guided by principles. Many believe that more actions will make them more strategic.
The danger arises when people only know how to add to their to-do list, but forget how to subtract from it. Being only action-oriented leads them to do more and more, and achieve less and less. In these situations, knowing when to stop is as important as knowing when to start.