There is a scene that repeats itself in a lot of young companies. It is Monday morning, the leadership team is gathering, and someone walks in with a fresh idea that landed over the weekend. New angle, new product hook, new audience, new channel. The pitch sounds sharp. The logic is not wrong. Heads nod around the table. A few priorities shift to make room. A designer is pulled onto a “quick test,” a landing page is reworked, a sprint board gets rearranged.

The same thing happens the next week with a different idea. Then the week after that. From the top, it feels like energy. You are close to the work, you are responding to what you hear from customers and investors, you are not sitting still while the market moves. It is easy to tell yourself that this is what engaged leadership looks like.

From inside the team, it feels very different. Projects never quite finish. Experiments do not run the full course that was planned. Campaigns are launched, paused, and replaced before there is enough data to learn anything useful. People start to recognize the pattern …