You have the strategy
The people
The budget
The commitment
And still the results don’t match the effort.
THAT’S DRAG
THE PUZZLE
Why don’t the results match the effort?
The people are capable. The strategy makes sense. The investment is there.
Everyone is working harder than ever.
And yet projects run late. ROI is disappointing. Decisions take too long. Priorities multiply. Key people become bottlenecks. Progress feels permanently uphill.
Something is absorbing the effort.
I call it drag.
Drag is the accumulated weight of everything your organisation is carrying that isn’t moving it forward.
Blood Sweat and Business is about finding the drag - and removing it.
THE PATTERNS
More than 50 organisations. 15+ industries. Global companies, founder-led businesses, and almost everything in between.
Different strategies. Different people. Different problems.
The same patterns kept appearing.
I’ve spent 25 years watching this happen
BLOOD SWEAT & BUSINESS
Issue One: October 2026
This month: Overwhelm
Everyone is busy but nothing is moving.
There doesn’t have to be a bad strategy, a weak leader or a broken team for an organisation to stop working well.
Sometimes, there is simply too much all at once.
This month: how sensible decisions accumulate into overwhelm, and why doing less may be the most serious performance decision you make.
THE BIG IDEA: Nothing Has to Be Wrong for Everything to Become Too Much
How perfectly reasonable decisions combine to create an unreasonable organisation.
How you can have all of the resources you need but somehow still aren’t getting the results you expect.
FROM THE FIELD: The Organisation With Forty Top Priorities
A true story about what happens when everything matters.
THE PRACTICE: If We Do This, What Stops?
One question to ask before adding anything.
More can make it worse
THE ARGUMENT
When results disappoint, organisations rarely respond by taking something away.
They add.
Another priority. Another initiative. Another process. Another meeting. Another layer of governance. Another hire. Another transformation. Another push for pace.
Almost every addition makes sense on its own.
That’s how organisations become overwhelmed without anyone making an obviously stupid decision.
Eventually, people spend so much time navigating the work that there is less and less time left to do it.
Good people compensate. Leaders push harder. Everyone gets busier.
And the results still don’t match the effort.
MAKING SENSE OF THE MESS
You can’t change what you can’t see
Organisations are messy. One problem looks like ten. Symptoms get mistaken for causes. And capable people end up fixing the wrong things.
My work is about making that mess easier to see, name and change.
Over 25 years, the things I kept seeing became patterns, laws and rational-lies, a language for understanding what’s really going on underneath the noise.
PATTERNS
Recognise what you’re looking at.
The Dependency Spiral. The Context Gap. The Velocity Trap. Organisational Debt.
THE LAWS
Understand what keeps happening, and why.
The Law of Costly Relief. The Law of Seniority and Insulation. The Law of Displaced Diagnosis.
THE RATIONAL-LIES
Question the things that sound completely reasonable.
We’ve invested too much to change direction.
Things will calm down soon, that will fix everything.
Seeing it is useful. Changing it is better.
The work is becoming practical tools for diagnosing drag and doing something about it.
WHERE DO YOU SIT?
The problem may be the same.
Your power to change it isn’t.
Where you sit changes what you can see, what you can change, and what you have to work around.
I lead the organisation
You’ve hired good people. Made changes. Reset priorities. Brought in help.
And some problems keep coming back.
You have the power to change the system. The harder question is knowing what actually needs changing.
CEO · Founder
I work inside it
You can see what’s happening. You’ve probably said it.
But you still have to get things done inside the organisation as it exists today.
You may not be able to reset the system. You can get much better at reading it, navigating it and influencing it.
C-Suite · Senior & Mid-level Leaders
Investors · NEDs
I invest in or govern it
By the time information reaches you, it has travelled a long way.
You have influence and perspective, but you’re not living inside the organisation every day.
The challenge is knowing what to look for, what to question and when to dig deeper.
THE PROMISE
I won’t add to the weight
If your organisation is already carrying too much, the last thing it needs is another methodology to implement.
So I start with a different question:
What’s the lightest thing that might help?
A better question. A useful tool. A decision that needs making. Sometimes something bigger.
But bigger is never the starting assumption.
The point isn’t to become good at my way of working. It’s to get better at yours.
One body of work. Many ways in.
READ
New thinking every month.
EXPLORE
Patterns, laws and rational-lies for making sense of what you’re seeing.
USE
Practical tools for finding drag and doing something about it.
STAY WITH IT
WHERE THIS CAME FROM
For 25 years, I’ve worked inside organisations trying to make them work better.
I’ve run transformations, coached leaders, sat in the rooms where decisions were made, and then in the rooms where people tried to make those decisions real.
Again and again, I watched brilliant work succeed in one team, one function, one corner of an organisation, then struggle when it met the wider system.
Eventually I started asking a different question:
What if the answer isn’t another better island? What if we change the sea?
I’m Lizzy Arnold. Blood Sweat and Business is the work that came out of trying to answer it.