TBM 401: Solving Problems the Hard Way - by John Cutler

The core insight is that effective leadership creates a handful of stable yet flexible "lanes" - semi-independent workstreams with clear owners - and couples them with simple weekly rituals. The lanes are not rigid plans; they are deliberately vague enough to evolve, but specific enough to drive coordinated action. When a leader consistently models these habits, the team learns to own the process and stay aligned without the leader having to micromanage.

The author describes running the entire system in a single shared document that is copied forward each week. The manual copying forces the team to reflect on what changed, what stalled, and what disappeared. This friction is intentional: it surfaces drift early and creates a shared narrative that the team can discuss and calibrate together. The first version of any lane is never perfect; the real value comes from the iterative arguments, the reframing, and the small adjustments that happen over time.

Keeping a team "working small and thinking big" requires constant course correction. Leaders must sense emerging drift, intervene without over-correcting, and keep the focus on both immediate metrics and longer-term direction. The piece warns that many frameworks pretend the process is stable, but in practice the lanes need to be reshaped, paused, or retired as reality shifts. Senior leaders face the added challenge that lanes become broader and their distance from execution grows, so they must still stay connected to the front-line details.

The article concludes with a practical eight-step playbook: define 3-5 lanes, write a short intent for each, assign one to three owners, add just enough information to reason about progress, keep the lanes in a shared place and copy them forward each cycle, review frequently, adopt a depth-of-field mindset, and be ready to refactor or retire lanes. These steps turn an abstract idea into a repeatable habit that helps teams maintain alignment, ownership, and momentum.