You don’t run out of time.
You run out of excuses.

By the time you’ve explained why something still isn’t working for the fifth time, your team’s stopped listening. And maybe you should too.

The Excuse Machine

There are always perfectly logical, valid reasons why things are hard. Why your org isn’t moving faster. Why you haven’t executed that strategy. Why you still haven’t filled that critical role. And if you’re smart (and frankly my readers likely are), you can generate these excuses by the dozen without breaking a sweat.

It’s one of the weird curses of intelligent leadership: our brain is so good at explaining things away, that we start to confuse the explanation with a solution. I’ve worked with companies where execs blamed weak middle management for lack of progress… without realizing they were the ones who hired and coached them. Or a startup that delayed a make-or-break initiative for over a year, always due to “urgent fires.” Like the person too busy to sharpen a saw, the lack of progress kept making the company vulnerable to these fires.

Stuck in the Pattern

The worst part isn’t the excuse itself—it’s the pattern. When the same issues resurface again and again, when every retro has a different story but the same ending, we normalize the dysfunction.

“No one could have predicted that issue,” they say.
But if unpredictable issues are a constant then you can predict that. Welcome to Groundhog Day Leadership: same blockers, new excuses.

The more we repeat these stories, the more they become part of the company’s internal monologue. They stop being problems to solve and become facts of life. That’s how excuses calcify into culture.

Break the Cycle

When I work with leaders as an advisor or coach, part of my job is pattern recognition. It’s easier from the outside to say: “Hey, didn’t we already talk about this exact thing three months ago?” But sometimes you don’t have me in the room.

Here’s a simple tactic:
Start pasting your weekly retro or meeting summaries into a ChatGPT session and ask it to identify recurring challenges or repeated rationalizations. Even better: have it ask what’s being explained, but not owned.

Once you spot the pattern, you’ve got a choice to make. You can:

• Decide to actually live with it (you kinda already are)
• Delegate or assign ownership to someone else
• Try a completely different approach. Maybe the thing you’ve been resisting is now the best path. For example, if you’ve been stuck trying to build a system in-house for 18 months, maybe your company’s gotten to a point where buying makes more sense.
  

Final Shot

If your org keeps going in circles, the problem is likely the map you’re using. And chances are, that map was drawn by your excuses.