Hey :) 

There's a question I've started asking people when I want to understand how clearly they're thinking about their business.

It's not "what are you working on?" or "what are your goals for the year?"

It's this: Give me an example of something you've said NO to recently.

A project you turned down. An opportunity you walked away from. An idea someone brought to the table that you decided wasn't worth pursuing right now.

If you can answer that question quickly, with a real example, you probably have some semblance of a strategy. You know what you're doing and why, which means you also know what doesn't belong.

If you can't answer it — if you're sitting there thinking, we don't really say no to things — then I'd argue you don't have a strategy at all. You have a bias towards action. And that bias is quietly costing you far more than you realise.

When most people talk about the dangers of doing too much, they focus on wasted effort. All those hours spent on things that didn't matter. All that energy burned on the wrong work.

That's a real cost. But it's not the biggest one.

The biggest cost of action bias is opportunity cost — and opportunity cost is almost impossible to see.

If you spend half a day filming a YouTube video that nobody asked for and that isn't connected to any real problem in the business, you don't just lose half a day. You lose whatever that half day could have built. A sales conversation that might have landed a client. A system that would have made next month easier. Thinking time that might have revealed the one thing that changes everything.

You'll never know what you missed. And that's exactly what makes action bias so dangerous.

A stupid person doesn't know they're stupid. Someone with a raging bias for action doesn't know they're wasting their potential. They feel productive. They feel busy. The work looks real. The calendar is full.

But busyness is not progress. And action is not the same thing as the right action.

Here's a real example from my own business.

Recently, one of my partners suggested we should start a YouTube channel.

On the surface, it sounds reasonable. Video content. Growing audience. Building authority. These are all things a business might want.

But when I heard the idea, my first question wasn't "how do we do it?" It was "why do we need it?"

Specifically: what problem in the business does this solve?

We didn't ask that question. Nobody had gone through the process of identifying a critical challenge the business was facing, listing potential solutions to that challenge, and arriving at "YouTube channel" as the best answer. The idea came from somewhere external — a competitor doing well on video, a peer building an audience, some ambient pressure to be more visible.

In other words, the tail was wagging the dog.

My concern wasn't the YouTube channel itself. It was what it represented. Time, energy, and attention — finite resources — being pulled towards something with no strategic anchor. And if we're spending half a day filming, editing, and publishing videos, what aren't we doing? What problem is sitting unsolved while we're in front of a camera?

I want to be clear: I'm prepared to be wrong. If someone can show me the thinking — here's the problem we're facing, here's why a YouTube channel is the best solution to that problem, here's how we'll know if it's working — then I'll support it completely. Strategy isn't "no to everything." Strategy is being deliberate about what gets a yes.

But without that thinking, a YouTube channel isn't a strategy. It's a distraction dressed up as ambition.

We built ScoreApp assessments last year. Spent at least a week and a half on them. Decent work, properly executed.

Nobody has taken a single assessment in six months.

We were caught up in the tool. We got excited about what ScoreApp could do, we built things inside it, and we confused activity with progress. There was no strategy behind it — no problem we were trying to solve, no evidence that assessments were what our audience needed. We just did it because it seemed like a good idea and we had the capacity to execute.

That week and a half? Gone. Not recoverable. And what stings isn't the time itself — it's the knowledge that we could have spent that time on sales, on building something that compounds, on fixing one of the real constraints in the business.

This is what action bias does over time. It's not dramatic. It doesn't announce itself. It just quietly eats away at your potential, one half-reasonable idea at a time, until you look back and realise you've been incredibly busy and haven't moved nearly as far as you should have.

Busyness is woodworm. It looks fine on the surface. But it's hollowing you out from the inside.

Here's what makes this so hard to fix.

When you waste a week on the wrong thing, you usually don't know it was the wrong thing. You feel like you worked hard. You shipped something. You did the work. The problem is invisible because the alternative — what you could have done instead — is also invisible.

This is why I believe that action bias is a particularly insidious problem for smart, capable, motivated people. Lazy people don't have this problem. They're not doing much anyway. It's the driven people — the ones who want to build something meaningful, who care about results, who take pride in their work — who are most at risk. Because they're the ones who will throw real effort at the wrong things and still come up short.

The antidote isn't less ambition. It's better thinking before the action starts.

I want to be clear that this isn't an argument against action. It's an argument for the right sequence.

The person who sharpens the axe before chopping down the tree isn't being slow. They're being smart. They'll cut the tree down faster and with less effort than the person who started swinging straight away. Sharpening is the work. Thinking is the work. It just doesn't look like it.

Here's the sequence I use, and try to bring into every business I work with:

Start with vision. What kind of business are you trying to build? Not a goal — a picture of the future you're working towards.

Identify the constraint. Given that vision, what's the single biggest problem standing between where you are now and where you want to be? Every business has one dominant constraint at any given time. It's usually in one of three places: not enough demand, not enough conversions, or a delivery problem causing churn.

Go deeper into the problem. What makes that problem hard to solve? What are the smaller challenges nested inside it?

Generate solutions. Now — and only now — do you start asking what to do. What are all the possible ways you could address this? A YouTube channel might appear on this list. It probably won't be at the top.

Choose deliberately. Pick the best idea. Assign it. Build it into a project with clear ownership and a defined outcome.

When you work this way, every action is tethered to a real problem. You know why you're doing what you're doing. And because you know why, you also know what doesn't deserve your time — which means you can say no quickly, clearly, and without guilt.

Goals, by the way, come out of this process. They don't start it. A goal that isn't the product of real strategic thinking is just a wish with a deadline.

The last piece of this is about the people around you.

If you want a team that thinks before it acts, you have to give them the same thing you want for yourself: space.

Not tasks. Not solutions handed down from above. Problems to think about. Room to figure things out. Questions that challenge them to justify the work before they start it.

The questions I ask — and that I think every leader should ask more often — are simple:

These aren't gotcha questions. They're the questions that separate work with strategic intent from work that just fills the day.

And here's the thing I believe strongly enough to say plainly: I would rather someone on my team did nothing than kept themselves busy with the wrong work. Nothing. Sit and think. Go for a walk. Read something useful. Doing nothing is better than doing the wrong thing, because at least it doesn't consume the time and attention that the right thing needs.

That will sound extreme to some people. Good. It's meant to.

Because the goal was never to be busy.

The goal was always to build something worth building.

And you can't do that if you never slow down long enough to think about what that actually requires.

Not "what should we be doing?"
But — "what are we not doing, because we're too busy doing this?"

That's where the real work starts.

🗣️ 👀

Chris.