Your Sequencing Is Lying to You

I was standing in a Starbucks line recently, watching the person ahead of me reach the counter, pause, study the menu, order, and then dig through her bag for her phone to pay. Eight people waiting behind her.

She didn't just waste her own time. She borrowed eight other people's time without asking.

This is just how my mind works. I can't help but see a Starbucks line and think about execution. Because the dynamic is identical. It's a sequencing problem, and it's costing you more than you think.

Every initiative has real constraints. Some work genuinely can't begin until something else happens first. But teams routinely treat optional sequencing like a hard requirement, and the cost isn't just the delay. It's everything that could have been happening while everyone was waiting.

Say you're preparing to launch a new product. The finished product is the gate—for some things. But your sales team doesn't need it finished to learn the customer profile, the competitive landscape, and the objections they'll face. Your marketing team doesn't need it to develop messaging and positioning. You can identify and warm up target accounts, build out your sales playbooks, and set up your CRM long before the product ships.

Before you execute, go through your plan and ask what each item actually requires before it can begin. Some steps are genuinely sequential. Others just look that way because nobody questioned the order. When you let an unchallenged assumption govern the whole schedule, you're making everyone wait on a line that didn't have to be that long.

The best executing teams don't have more time. They just make better use of the time they’ve got.