Happy Triple Threat Thursday.
Here’s one Signal to notice, one thing to Spark growth and one Shift to consider.
Have you ever hired a marketing agency, reviewed the work a few weeks in, and thought, this isn’t bad… but it’s not right either?
Not wrong enough to fire them.
Not strong enough to feel confident.
So you give more feedback. Clarify the brief. Add context. Answer follow-up questions. Schedule another review.
The agency is working. Your internal team is working harder. Everyone is busy.
What’s easy to miss is what’s actually happening.
Payroll, internal and external, is being spent to figure out what should have been decided before the work started.
📡 Signal — What’s Changing
Payroll is absorbing system failure
As companies grow, more paid time is spent translating vague decisions into something workable.
The work still gets done.
That’s what makes this hard to see.
Product waits on clarity. Marketing revises positioning. Sales asks how to handle edge cases. Managers step in to interpret intent. Meetings multiply to keep things moving.
From the outside, the business looks busy and functional.
Inside, payroll is funding judgment calls that should have been settled upstream.
Execution drag is no longer caused by lack of effort or skill. It’s caused by the system offloading decisions onto people who are paid to execute, not interpret.
When clarity is missing, payroll becomes the shock absorber.
If payroll feels heavy without clear output gains, the issue is unfinished decisions, not underperformance.
⚡ Spark — What to Try This Week
Run a rework cost calculator
Run a rework cost calculator
This takes 20 minutes. No spreadsheets. No tooling.
Pick one workflow that matters.
Something cross-functional. Something tied to revenue or delivery.
Think about the work that “almost ships.” The second pass. The clarification. The late-stage adjustment that feels reasonable but adds hours.
Answer three questions:
How many times does this work get revised before it’s considered done?
How many people touch it each time?
What is the fully loaded hourly cost of those people?
Do the math.
Most teams are surprised by the number. Not because it’s catastrophic. Because it’s constant.
Rework isn’t a one-off mistake. It’s a recurring operating expense hiding inside payroll.
If rework is expensive, clarity will return more capacity than hiring ever will.
🔄 Shift — How to Rethink It
Rework is a leadership tax, not an execution failure
When a project keeps looping, the instinct is to manage harder or swap vendors.
But rework usually isn’t a quality issue.
And it’s rarely a communication issue.
It happens when judgment is missing, tradeoffs are unstated, or ownership is unclear. People guess. The system corrects them later.
That correction is paid for in payroll.
If work keeps getting redone, leadership already paid for the mistake, just not all at once.
Rework is the interest on unresolved decisions.
Reducing rework requires deciding earlier and more clearly, not asking teams to be more careful.
📚 Worth A Look
Recent research is converging on the same conclusion. Execution waste shows up as labor cost before it ever shows up as failure.
🔗 The hidden cost that’s draining your organization. Rework
A December 30, 2025 Forbes piece explains how rework quietly erodes productivity and margins by consuming paid time without producing net new output.
🔗 Why execution slows as organizations scale
A January 2026 Harvard Business Review article shows how coordination and rework costs rise faster than output as companies grow, even when teams remain capable and motivated.
🔗 In 2026 leaders’ biggest concern should be decision avoidance
Hesitating on important decisions isn’t neutral. Avoidance compounds hidden costs and organizational risk over time.
📈 TL;DR
Most payroll waste isn’t visible. It hides in unresolved decisions, rework, and clarification.
📈 One Question
Where are you paying people to clean up uncertainty instead of produce results?
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.