It starts with a familiar rhythm.
Morning check-ins. Slack pings. A client fire. A vendor delay. A manager who’s out sick. A project deadline that’s now suddenly “urgent” — even though it’s been on the calendar for three weeks.
You jump in. You delegate fast. You adjust priorities. You clear the path.
It feels productive. Energizing, even. You’re moving. Your team’s moving.
But there’s something else happening under the surface.
Your business has already made strategic choices; about what to pursue, how to deliver, and where to focus. But urgency has a way of pushing those choices to the side. In the name of speed, the business starts reacting instead of aligning. The plan fades. Chaos fills the gap.
And the most frustrating part? You’ve seen this before. Maybe even fixed it before.
But without the right systems in place, the cycle repeats. Fast days. Busy weeks. Misfires. Exhaustion.
The strategic cost of operating in urgency
Years ago, Tim Ferris made the point in “The 4-Hour Workweek,” that most people live in a constant state of distraction and reactivity and call it productivity. That same idea plays out at the organizational level.
Living in urgency is a strategy. It’s just not a conscious one.
It’s the default state when clarity is missing. When roles and outcomes blur. When accountability breaks down.
In mid-sized businesses, especially those with 50 to 150 employees, this becomes a pattern. Everyone is busy, but no one is aligned. And the owner? They become the system that holds it all together — again.
What functional alignment makes possible
This is where functional alignment comes in; a core part of the People OS framework.
Functional alignment means mapping your business by outcome, not just by department or title. It means clarifying what needs to happen, who owns it, and how success is measured, across all levels of the business.
When that alignment is in place, you’re not constantly stepping in. The team knows what matters. They act on strategic choice instead of urgency. And you get to lead from a place of intention, not reaction.
The real question isn’t “how do I get out of urgency?”
It is really about: What choices have we already made that we’re not honoring?
Because urgency doesn’t just happen. It creeps in when the business forgets the choices it’s already made and stops reinforcing them.
People OS doesn’t fix everything overnight. But it starts with a simple shift: clarifying the structure, roles, and rhythms that keep strategy intact: even when things get busy.
Curious if your urgency is helping or hurting? Let’s talk.
No pitch. Just a 30-minute conversation about what you’re seeing.
