Happy Triple Threat Thursday!
Here’s one Signal to notice, one Spark to try, and one Shift to consider.
This week’s theme: Work moves faster when teams stop carrying decisions the system should have made for them.
📡 Signal — What’s Changing
Many companies that look healthy on paper are losing revenue to internal friction.
Over the last year, I have worked with leadership teams whose numbers looked fine at first glance.
Pipeline was solid.
Customer demand was real.
Teams were capable.
And yet: Revenue felt harder to earn than it should.
Nothing catastrophic. Just drag everywhere.
Deals required extra follow up.
Projects needed clarification halfway through.
Customers asked questions late in the process that should have been resolved early.
Research supports this pattern. Bain and McKinsey have each documented how coordination costs rise faster than output as companies scale. Salesforce hinted at the same dynamic when they slowed hiring despite steady demand. More activity was not creating more leverage.
Inside companies, this shows up in everyday ways:
Sales explaining delivery constraints too late
Marketing optimizing for volume while sales optimizes for quality
Leaders stepping in to resolve issues that feel necessary, not strategic
None of these moments trigger alarms.
All of them add weight.
Why it matters now: In tighter markets, companies cannot afford friction they do not see. The winners will not be the busiest. They will be the least wasteful.
What to do this week: Pay attention to moments when customers or internal teams need extra reassurance before moving forward.
In B2B, this sounds like “Can you walk me through this again” or “Let me double check something on my side.”
In B2C, it shows up as abandoned carts, repeated support questions, or customers hesitating at the final step.
These are not messaging problems.
They are friction signals.
⚡ Spark — What to Try This Week
The Hidden Effort Auditor GPT
Every business has work that looks fine in a status update but feels heavy in practice.
This GPT helps you see where that weight is coming from.
What it is: A custom GPT that walks you through your recent wins and identifies the quiet friction inside them.
It highlights:
Where momentum slowed
Where someone stepped in at the last minute
Where decisions depended on memory instead of structure
Where effort increased without increasing value
It does not evaluate performance.
It exposes the parts of the system that are adding unnecessary work.
Why it works: Leaders often look at outcomes. Operators look at tasks. The friction lives in the space between the two.
This GPT makes that space visible.
Fixing one small upstream point often removes a surprising amount of downstream effort.
Small clarity creates real movement.
🔄 Shift — How to Rethink It
Default belief: Growth problems show up in losses.
Flip: Growth problems often hide inside wins.
Most executives study failure.
But in scaled organizations, the real danger often hides in the wins that required more effort than anyone expected.
In a recent engagement, the leadership team could not understand why revenue felt heavier. Deals closed. Renewals held. On the surface, everything worked.
But every win required extra touches.
Extra explanations.
Extra judgment.
Extra steps leaders assumed the system was carrying.
Revenue had not dropped yet.
Effort had doubled.
By the time growth slowed, the organization had been compensating for months.
Why it matters:
If success requires intervention, it will not scale.
If teams rely on judgment because the system does not provide clarity, they will eventually burn out.
How to apply it:
Review one recent win with your team
Ask where effort exceeded expectations
Remove or redesign that step before it becomes a permanent workaround
Great leaders do more than celebrate wins.
They understand how hard those wins were.
💡 Operator Insight
I asked a leadership team to walk me through a project they said took forever.
Everyone blamed workload.
When we mapped it, the actual work took six hours.
The timeline took seven weeks.
Seven weeks of waiting for clarity, waiting for approval, waiting for someone to say yes.
The drag was not the task.
The drag was everything wrapped around it.
No one had seen the problem through that lens.
📚 What I’m Reading
🔗 How Behavioral Science Can Improve the Return on AI Investments
Insight: Most AI investments fail not because of the technology, but because leaders ignore human behavior, incentives, and decision design. Structure determines ROI.
🔗 How to Operationalize AI Accountability: A Leadership Playbook
Insight: AI only works at scale when accountability, ownership, and governance are clearly designed. This is a leadership problem, not a tooling problem.
🔗 Four Ways AI Will Redefine Roles, Decisions, and Accountability in 2026
Insight: The real impact of AI will show up in who decides what and how work moves, not in task automation. Companies that redesign roles early will move faster.
📈 TL;DR
Healthy companies often lose revenue through small friction inside wins.
Studying what almost broke surfaces constraints earlier than studying losses.
One upstream redesign can remove weeks of downstream effort.
Thanks for reading Triple Threat. See you next Thursday with another Signal, Spark, and Shift.
— Alexandria Ohlinger
p.s. If this helped you think sharper or move faster, share it with someone who builds the way you do. And if you want more practical insight between issues, connect with me on LinkedIn.