Why work keeps getting stuck in the middle

Most teams don’t struggle to start work — they struggle to finish it.
You can see it on every board: work in progress everywhere, but not much moving to done.

The middle is where work goes to die. It’s where effort builds up, visibility fades, and nobody’s quite sure what’s next.

The reason? We measure the wrong thing — and what you measure drives behaviour.
We celebrate starting, so people focus on starting.
It’s easy to define “started” — have you begun?
But if instead we measured finishing, if we asked what can we complete today?, we’d shift the focus entirely.
Once everyone understands what “done” looks like, behaviour naturally follows — more finishing, less starting, and far more flow.

And once you define “done,” you hit the next challenge — how big should the work be?

That’s where I use what I call the Goldilocks paradigm.
When teams start breaking work down, they often overdo it.
They create hundreds of micro-tasks — each taking minutes to finish, but impossible to see as real progress.
So they swing the other way and make work so large and vague that movement disappears again.

The trick is to find the just right zone — where work is small enough to move, but big enough to matter.

I saw this clearly when I worked at MBDA. Some of their documents take years to write — complex, multi-stage, and reliant on experiments and analysis that can’t be rushed. But even there, the difference between chaos and progress came down to one thing: breaking the work into clear, finishable chunks.

If you define each step properly, you can still show progress every few days — even when the final outcome takes months. That’s what visibility really looks like.

And here’s the kicker — I can’t tell you what “just right” looks like for your team. But I can tell you this:
If work items move every two or three days, you’ll start to see patterns.
You’ll spot blockers faster.
You’ll actually see flow instead of waiting for it to happen.

Because you can’t fix what you can’t see — and you can’t see work that’s either microscopic or massive.

So, when you look at your board this week, ask yourself:
Do we all agree what “done” looks like?
And is our work sized so we can actually see it move?

Then try this:
Count how many items you’ve got in progress and divide by the number of people in your team.
If that number’s more than three — we need to talk.
Or look at how long work sits before you see visible progress.
If it’s more than a week — we really need to talk.

The goal isn’t to start more.
It’s to finish better — at the right pace, in the right size, for the right reason.