With so much emphasis on productivity these days, an underappreciated problem is work avoidance—not doing what you should be doing because you are doing something else. This is particularly sinister because there is often too much work to do in any given day and we reduce anxiety with activity.
For manager, that means avoiding the right problems because it’s difficult. They are seduced by doing something that’s more immediate, or they are good at, or praised for doing (like the work of an individual contributor when time is tight).
Over time, work avoidance severely harms a teams ability to do ambitious things.
See also:
- For tech debt, closing the gap between previous technical decisions and the current quality bar, this might look like putting off the refactoring even though the whole team is slowing down
- For product, strategy bugs might be difficult to resolve, but not working on it makes failure certain (maybe not immediately though)