Why organizational focus keeps moving
This series began with a joke: good boss, good product, good team. Pick two.
After looking more closely at Leadership + Team, I kept coming back to an objection. Lencioni calls organizational health the ultimate competitive advantage. Jim Collins says, "First who, then what." There should be room for a mature company with enough money to keep all three strong.
I saw one organization make a serious attempt. Several of its improvements made the other changes harder to carry out.
They tried to repair everything together
New leadership arrived and began building a team with stronger skills. They also removed leaders who had ended up in their roles by coincidence and sharpened the strategy. I could see the reason for each decision.
The few leaders who remained were then asked to take over teams they hadn't built. Those teams had been shaped for compliance, while the new strategy needed something more from them. As the remaining leaders began to leave, there were fewer people able to connect the strategic direction with the organization expected to deliver it.
The new strategy depended on people who were still learning how to work together. Removing leaders had also removed some of the support those people needed. I don't take that as proof that all three pillars are impossible, but trying to repair them together created more change than this organization could absorb.
There is only so much a team can change at once
I come from a developer background, so I tend to see organizations as systems with bottlenecks, feedback loops, and finite capacity. That bias may be leading me here, but it gives me a better explanation than simple neglect.
An organization that pours attention into strategy creates more strategic decisions, deadlines, and measures. Those demands consume leadership time and team energy. A push to rebuild team health requires slower conversations, steadier work, and room to learn. A push for stronger leadership changes who can decide and which decisions stay with the team.
The third pillar can weaken even when everybody agrees that it matters. If the daily work rewards faster decisions and more releases, the team gets more practice at those things while maintenance or shared ownership slips. Finding time to work on the third pillar means changing some of the work that is reinforcing the other two.
I'd expect Denmark's flatter structures and collective agreements built around a 37-hour working week to soften some of this. I've still seen the pattern here. Even with decent working conditions, a team has to choose how much change it can take on.
The weak pillar eventually interrupts
In the companies I've described, the neglected problem eventually became impossible to work around. The SaaS company lost experienced engineers to the pace of delivery. The fintech company abandoned the feature its customers hadn't wanted. Their earlier successes couldn't keep those problems off the agenda.
That's the cycle I was missing at the start of the series. An organization can care about all three while its day-to-day effort goes mostly toward two. Eventually it has to shift that effort.
I've come to read "pick two" as a question about what we're giving attention to now. If the third is starting to suffer, making time for it means slowing something else down.
I thought that was the end of the idea. A couple of weeks later, I realized I had tied the cycle too closely to the life of an entire company. That became the unexpected sixth post.