4) The permission Paradox-The Strange Sense of Calm

"It wasn't the 23% output increase that surprised me. It was the calm and absence of stress."

This is what a mine executive said to me last year. After eighteen months of watching a fixable problem persist, his CEO finally put something in writing: authorisation to prioritise system flow when departmental KPIs conflicted.

What happened next was not just breakthrough; it was a collapse of the firefighting mode they were always in.

Departments that had been locked in quiet combat now started coordinating. The Monday plan survived past Wednesday. The operations manager arrived at a meeting and realised he had no urgent matter to discuss.

The Head of Operations told me, "I sat at my desk, and felt a strange sense of calm. I wondered if this is what my role was meant to feel like."

What Your GM Actually Needs

I've spent the last three posts explaining the Permission Paradox: how capable leaders get trapped by KPIs that optimise departments while fragmenting the system.

But I've left one question unanswered: What does the fix require?

The answer is simpler and yet harder than most executives expect.

Your GM doesn't need another consultant, they don't need another system, and they don't need you to fire anyone. Simply, all they need is authorisation to coordinate with others when KPIs conflict.

Specifically:

→ Permission to prioritise system flow over local metrics when the constraint is threatened.

→ Explicit protection for leaders who sacrifice their departmental KPIs to help the bottleneck.

→ A bounded timeframe (90 days) that makes it a contained experiment, not a permanent restructure.

→ Your visible backing, so it doesn't look like the GM has gone rogue

That's it.

Why This Is Hard

Providing this authorisation acknowledges that the current KPI structure might be part of the issue.

That's uncomfortable. You didn't deliberately design these KPIs to be unfair. They developed from industry standards and solid financial reasoning. Challenging them can seem like questioning your own judgment.

But here's the liberation: you don't need another transformation program. You don't need to restructure. You don't need consultants to spend six months diagnosing what your team already knows.

You require a decision.

The Decision

If an asset keeps showing up in your variance explanations, ask yourself:

Have I explicitly authorised my GM to prioritise flow when it conflicts with local KPIs?

Have I put it in writing?

Have I protected the people who will need to act on it?

If not, you might be the approval they've been waiting eighteen months for.

And perhaps they didn't know how to ask.

A question worth contemplating: What would change at your problem asset if your GM knew—in writing—that protecting the constraint takes precedence over local metrics, and that leaders who act accordingly will be safeguarded?