The Missing Middle: Shift Your Team's Focus from Tasks to Decisions
The quarterly program review. Watermelon slides, all of them. Green on the outside, red on the inside.
The team leader taps her pen against her notebook, while the lead engineer shifts in his chair. The PMO catches my eye for half a second, then looks away. No one dares to verbalize what we all know to be true—that every green screen depends on assumptions that continue to go unquestioned. After nearly a decade of corporate transformation, I’ve seen countless initiatives fall to the same silence.
Organizations are well versed in setting goals, defining tasks, and connecting them with a roadmap. That works well when the world holds still long enough for the plan to play out, but what happens when markets shift mid-quarter, competitors make moves you didn’t anticipate, and the assumptions underneath your strategy quietly stop being true?
What’s missing is the layer of strategic judgment between where you are today and where you’re trying to go. Rather than a better plan, organizations across the board need a better system for deciding what to do next, given what you know now. Without it, teams keep executing against goals that made sense six months ago while the world moves on without them. That gap is the missing middle.
References
- Kahneman, D. & Frederick, S. (2002). Representativeness revisited: Attribute substitution in intuitive judgment. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, & D. Kahneman (Eds.), Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment. Cambridge University Press.
- Goodhart, C. A. E. (1975). Problems of Monetary Management: The U.K. Experience. In Papers in Monetary Economics. Reserve Bank of Australia.
- Amabile, T. M. & Kramer, S. J. (2011). The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. Harvard Business Review Press.
- Diwas S. KC, Bradley R. Staats, Maryam Kouchaki, Francesca Gino (2020) Task Selection and Workload: A Focus on Completing Easy Tasks Hurts Performance. Management Science 66(10):4397-4416
- Ranganathan, A. & Ye, X. M. (2026). AI Doesn't Reduce Work—It Intensifies It. Harvard Business Review.
- Freepik. (n.d.). Asian businessmen and businesswomen meeting brainstorming ideas about creative web design [Photograph]. Magnific/Freepik. https://www.magnific.com/free-photo/asian-businessmen-businesswomen-meeting-brainstorming-ideas-about-creative-web-design-planning-application-developing-template-layout-mobile-phone-project-working-together-small-office_10075800.htm
About the Author
Harry Laplanche
Harry Laplanche is Head of Global AI Strategy & Transformation at Panasonic, where he drives the organization’s evolution from hardware to software and AI. Prior to Panasonic, he led innovation at Walmart’s Store No. 8 and Verizon’s 5G Business Incubation division. His background in consumer insights and behavioral science guides his approach to transformation, including designing operating models aligned with how organizations actually make decisions and change. He is a U.S. patent holder and received an MBA from the University of Illinois Gies College of Business.
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