Why Many Leaders Get Buried in Tactical Work

There's a fundamental choice in how you approach any complex challenge, and understanding this choice will change how you think about building your business.

It comes down to two completely different ways of organizing your thinking:

Functional thinking: Step-by-step, linear processing. "What needs to happen next?"

Holistic thinking: Pattern recognition and relationship mapping. "What naturally belongs together?"

I first learned this distinction in software development, where these represent two fundamentally different programming philosophies. But I've come to realize this same choice shows up everywhere in business leadership.

Functional thinking excels at execution. When you need to get something done, functional thinking breaks it down into a sequence: first this, then this, then this. It's the mindset that powers great project management, efficient processes, and reliable operations.

Holistic thinking excels at design. When you need to organize complexity, holistic thinking looks for natural groupings and relationships. It asks: "What belongs together? How do these pieces interact? What's the underlying structure?"

Here's what's fascinating: most business problems require both types of thinking, but in a specific sequence.

You need holistic thinking to see the patterns, then functional thinking to execute within those patterns.

Let me give you an example. When your business grows beyond a certain point, you naturally start grouping related activities together. All the customer-facing work goes to one team. All the product development goes to another. All the operations work goes to a third.

This isn't arbitrary—you're recognizing that certain activities logically belong to each other. You're creating what software developers would call "classes"—conceptual units that handle related functions.

But within each of those groups, you still need functional, step-by-step processes to get the actual work done.

The breakthrough insight: "Systems and processes are much more than just step-by-step instructions. It's about finding the natural order and the natural structure that is emerging from within the organization."

This is why some leaders get buried in tactical work while others can step back and see the bigger picture. The tactical leaders are stuck in pure functional thinking—just trying to get the next thing done. The strategic leaders toggle between holistic thinking (seeing patterns and structures) and functional thinking (executing within those structures).

The pattern recognition advantage:

When you develop holistic thinking, you start seeing relationships that others miss:

• How customer complaints in one area predict problems in another

• Why certain team conflicts keep recurring in different forms

• Which business activities naturally cluster together for efficiency

• How small changes in one part of the system affect everything else

This is the foundation for systems thinking—the ability to see not just tasks, but the relationships between tasks, the patterns that connect them, and the structures that organize them.

Your thinking audit:

When facing a business challenge, do you immediately jump to "what steps do I need to take?" (functional) or do you first ask "what patterns am I seeing here and how do the pieces fit together?" (holistic)?

Both approaches are valuable, but holistic thinking—seeing patterns and relationships—often reveals solutions that pure step-by-step thinking misses.

The most effective leaders consciously toggle between these two modes: using holistic thinking to understand the structure of a problem, then functional thinking to execute the solution.

How naturally do you see patterns and relationships in your business? What's one area where stepping back to see the bigger structure might reveal new approaches?