The Illusion of Busy: Why Busyness Feels Productive but Kills Flow

We’ve all seen it — the team that looks unstoppable.
Boards full, stand-ups lively, new features flying through development.
On paper, everything’s humming.
Except nothing’s shipping.

When I joined one such team, that was exactly the picture. They were smart, dedicated, and moving fast — but the releases had been paused for more than a year. Automated tests had broken, manual testers were swamped, and every sprint piled more work onto an already unmanageable backlog.

It wasn’t incompetence. It was good people doing the wrong kind of work because no one had the distance to see what was really happening. Everyone was trying to help — they just didn’t realise they were making things worse.

So what did I bring? A second opinion.
The ability to step back, see the whole system, and ask the questions that had gone missing.

The product owner was doing what most product owners do — pushing hard for new features to meet customer demand. The developers were pushing to deliver them. The testers were drowning in unfinished work. Nobody was wrong, but everyone was stuck.

The team didn’t need more ceremonies or motivation. They needed permission to stop.
To focus on what would actually get value flowing again.

So we did just that.
We froze new work, freed the testers from feature churn, and spent two weeks building a simple regression suite — one that included every new feature or fix.

Within a month, we’d turned the corner.
Releases that had been paused for 18 months started going out again — stable, clean, and with almost no rework.
My boss told me I had until December. It was March. We were delivering by April.

The change wasn’t technical. It was cultural.
We shifted from looking busy to delivering value.
From reacting to requests to managing flow deliberately.
From guilt and exhaustion to pride and control.

Busyness hides a thousand problems.
It looks productive, feels satisfying, and keeps everyone occupied — but it’s usually a sign the system has lost focus.

If you’re serious about improving delivery, you have to make space for valuable work before it arrives.
That means less noise, fewer starts, and more finishing.
Because you can’t take on valuable work if your hands are full of distractions.

Movement isn’t progress.
Progress is delivering something that matters.

And sometimes, all it takes to see that is a second opinion.