A plan that says yes to everything is a budget, not a strategy. Three questions we ask every leadership team. It is one of the patterns we see most often, and one of the easiest to fix once it has a name.
Where it shows up
It rarely appears in a board pack. It lives in habits: the way a sales team closes a quarter, the exceptions finance approves because they always have, the meeting that decides without anyone owning the decision.
Start by writing down what actually happens, not what the policy says. The gap between the two is usually where the value is.
What to do on Monday
Pick one decision, one product or one market. Make the economics visible to the people who make that call every week. Agree a single rule, test it for a month, and only then widen it.
Clear thinking is less about brilliance than about removing noise. Most of the work is deciding what not to look at.