What happens when we treat our business like a machine?

Most businesses are run as if they’re machines.

When something isn’t working, we assume a part needs to be fixed, replaced, or pushed harder.

• Marketing not converting? Change the message.
• Sales slowing down? Add pressure or incentives.
• Employees out of alignment with leadership? Introduce new processes or reorganize your teams.

This way of thinking is so common that it rarely gets questioned. But over time, I’ve come to believe that many of the problems leaders struggle with aren’t the result of poor execution or lack of effort. They come from a deeper misunderstanding of what a business actually is: A living system.

Your business is not a machine; it’s a living system.

I often think about this the way I think about well-designed structures. When a building is sound, you don’t notice how much it’s carrying. The weight is distributed. The supports are doing their job. Things feel steady, even under pressure.

When something underneath shifts, when the load changes or the structure no longer matches what it’s being asked to hold, you don’t always see a crack right away. You feel it first, in subtle ways.

I see this most clearly in organizations that are doing many things “right” on paper, yet still feel strained.

An example might be a company or nonprofit that is growing steadily, but every decision feels heavier than it should. Leadership meetings stretch longer. Conversations circle the same issues, over and over. There’s momentum, but it feels brittle and is easily disrupted by small setbacks or unexpected changes.

Or a marketing team that’s constantly busy, launching campaigns, refreshing messaging, trying new tactics… yet nothing quite sticks. The work keeps moving, but the clarity underneath never settles, so every initiative feels like starting over.

Maybe nothing is actually ‘broken.’ Then why does it feel so heavy?

In construction and professional services, this often shows up as operational excellence paired with internal tension. The work gets done. Clients are served. But the organization runs tight. People are stretched. Alignment depends on constant oversight rather than shared understanding.

Nothing is “broken,” per se, but the system feels compressed, like it’s carrying more weight than it was designed to hold.

Living systems behave this way under sustained pressure. They adapt. They compensate. Like a bad relationship, they find ways to keep functioning even when something underneath is unresolved. Over time, though, that compensation becomes the norm.

There is a hidden cost to normalizing tension.

When we treat businesses like machines, we tend to push past signals instead of listening to them. We normalize urgency. We assume tension is just part of growth and we mistake motion for health. At first, this looks like discipline, but eventually, it turns into fatigue.

Leaders often respond by adding more structure in the form of new frameworks, new tools, new roles, hoping the right fix will somehow relieve the pressure. Sometimes it helps, temporarily. But if the underlying lack of clarity hasn’t been addressed, the strain simply relocates.

This is where branding, strategy, and leadership intersect in a way that’s often misunderstood.

You can see it in the way teams hesitate or over-explain. It shows up when leaders carry the weight of decision-making alone because there isn’t a clear reference point to lean on, or when growth requires more effort than expected, even when opportunity is present.

What this series will explore…

Over the next 12 weeks, I’ll be writing about business through this lens, exploring what becomes possible when we approach organizations as living organisms to be understood.

I’ll explore what clarity can regulate, how tension accumulates, why urgency takes over when identity is unclear, and what changes when a business begins to feel steady again. This isn’t just theory, but rather patterns I have observed repeatedly in real organizations over the course of 25 years.

When we stop forcing outcomes, clarity has room to emerge.

If we approach business as a living system, then the work can’t be about forcing outcomes. Instead, it’s about creating the conditions that allow the system to function, adapt, and grow without strain.

This is where clarity lives; underneath the surface.