Everyone knows a project is happening. Nobody agrees why.
Joseph Szala describes an organization where everyone knows something is being done about online ordering, but the purpose sits inside one department. Operations will use it, marketing will promote it and leadership will ask about it. Yet the decision has been treated as somebody else's technical assignment.
In his ChatGTM conversation with Michael Beck and Chad Horn, Szala examines the quieter patterns that undermine a brand's potential. The problem is not always a dramatic strategic mistake. It can be an easy choice, a familiar assumption or a team protecting itself from the consequences of disagreeing.
His starting point is clarity: why the company is doing the work, what result it expects and what the solution must accomplish. Those questions sound basic until the people involved try answering them independently. Different answers reveal a problem worth solving before another product is purchased.
Borrow the question before borrowing the competitor's answer
Szala challenges the habit of treating a successful brand's visible choices as proof that the same approach belongs elsewhere. Seeing what a large competitor uses can be useful research, but it does not establish why that choice works or whether the surrounding conditions match.
He connects this with confirmation bias: once a team prefers an option, it can become very good at collecting evidence in its favor. The evaluation still looks active, but the conclusion has already begun to harden.
A practical safeguard is to write down the requirements before seeing the preferred solution. Include the constraints that make this business different. Then ask what evidence would cause the team to change its mind. An evaluation with no imaginable disconfirming result is closer to a justification exercise than a decision process.
Convenience solves the immediate pressure
The quick option has an understandable appeal. A leader wants an answer, a project is overdue and an available product can be implemented soon. Szala describes the relief of getting the task off someone's back, even when the longer-term fit has not received enough attention.
This does not make speed a mistake. It makes the tradeoff worth naming. A temporary solution may be entirely reasonable if its limits, owner and review date are explicit. Trouble develops when a short-term convenience becomes a permanent arrangement by default.
Before approving the easy option, ask what work it leaves behind. Will employees need a workaround? Will another department inherit a manual task? What becomes difficult if the business adds locations? Those questions bring future operating costs into a decision that might otherwise be judged only by how quickly the project can be declared complete.
Silos can turn useful disagreement into personal risk
Szala describes teams becoming protective when people worry about the consequences of sticking their neck out. Under those conditions, familiar choices feel safer and the organization becomes less willing to test a different approach.
Shared decision criteria can help. Bring the teams affected by a project into the discussion early enough to influence it. Distinguish a challenge to a proposed solution from a challenge to the person presenting it. Make it possible to report a problem without becoming the problem.
The aim is not endless consensus. Someone still needs responsibility for the decision. The improvement is that they receive information from the people who will operate, support and explain the result before the organization commits itself.
Build a habit of examining the decision
Szala suggests regularly asking where bias or convenience influenced recent choices. That question can become a useful review habit when it is specific enough to produce learning. General agreement that everyone should be less biased does little for the next purchasing meeting.
Choose one recent decision and reconstruct it. What problem was stated? Which alternatives were considered? What evidence changed the discussion? Where did the team rely on a competitor's example, a familiar framework or the desire to move quickly? The purpose is to improve the process, not stage a trial of the person who signed off.
Finish by changing one part of the next decision: write clearer requirements, involve a missing team or define a bounded test with a review point. A brand becomes more capable of moving forward when it can question its own habits without turning every question into a fight.
