When the task force arrives

By the time a task force is formed, the problem is already late.

This is the first signal that something went wrong before the task force was ever proposed. Problems that are caught early, by the people closest to them, with the authority to act, do not require task forces. They require decisions. Task forces are assembled when decisions were not made early enough, when the problem grew beyond the point where a normal operational response was sufficient, and when leadership needed to be seen to be doing something significant.

The task force is not a solution. It is a visible response to a problem that became visible too late.

In most organisations the person closest to the problem already knows what the solution is. They have known for some time. They have escalated it. They have presented it to their line manager, to the relevant stakeholders, to anyone with the authority to clear the bottleneck that is preventing them from acting. The response was slow. The priority was elsewhere. The budget was not available. The timing was not right.

Then the shareholders pushed. Or the regulator asked a question. Or the number appeared in a report that senior leadership reads. And suddenly the problem that the owner had been escalating for a year became urgent. Not because it changed. Because the audience changed.

The task force is assembled. And the owner watches it begin the journey they completed twelve months ago.

Key Takeaway: A task force is almost always a late response to a problem that had an early solution. The question worth asking before assembling one is simple. Has anyone spoken to the owner?

The task force is not a solution. It is a visible response to a problem that became visible too late.

Think Simple · Leadership · Here is How to Think · Vol 2: The Leader · Philosophy 5: Task Force vs Owner · Section: When the task force arrives

MarvinPro | November 2025

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The solution that was already there

The owner of a process, a function or a service area accumulates something that no task force can replicate quickly. Context.

They know the history of the problem. They know which approaches were tried before and why they failed. They know the regional variations and the legal constraints and the partner dependencies that make the standard solution unworkable in three of the six markets. They know the stakeholders who will resist and the ones who will champion. They know which part of the problem is genuinely complex and which part only appears complex because nobody has made a decision about it yet.

This context is not documented anywhere. It lives in the owner. It was built through months or years of operating inside the problem, not observing it from outside.

The owner also knows the solution. Not in theory. In practice. They have thought through the approach, identified the dependencies, estimated the timeline and mapped the risks. They have done this work because the problem is their problem. They cannot ignore it. They cannot deprioritise it. They carry it every day.

What they do not have is scope. The authority to act beyond their defined area. The budget to fund the fix. The access to the decision makers who need to approve the cross-functional changes the solution requires. These are not knowledge gaps. They are structural gaps. And they are the only thing standing between the owner and the solution.

A task force does not close these gaps faster than a direct conversation with the owner would. It closes them slower, at higher cost, after months of reaching the same conclusions the owner already had.

Key Takeaway: The owner already has the solution. What they need is scope, not a task force. The fastest path to resolution is always a direct conversation with the person who has been closest to the problem longest.

The owner did not need a task force. They needed someone to clear the bottleneck.

Think Simple · Leadership · Here is How to Think · Vol 2: The Leader · Philosophy 5: Task Force vs Owner · Section: The solution that was already there

MarvinPro | November 2025

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The cost of the task force

The cost of a task force is rarely calculated honestly.

The visible cost is the time of the members. Senior people, pulled from their primary responsibilities, attending meetings about a problem they are encountering for the first time. This cost is significant on its own.

The invisible cost is larger.

The first three months of a task force are almost entirely onboarding. Members need to understand the problem before they can contribute to the solution. They ask the questions the owner has already answered. They identify the constraints the owner has already mapped. They reach the preliminary conclusions the owner reached a year ago. They do this in meetings, because the task force operates through meetings, and meetings require coordination, and coordination requires availability, and availability is always the scarcest resource in a group of senior people with primary responsibilities elsewhere.

Add the holidays. The sickness. The competing priorities that pull task force members back to their real roles for weeks at a time. Add the decision making that slows when more people are involved, because alignment across a group takes longer than a decision made by someone with clear ownership and clear authority.

Add the attrition. Task force members lose interest. The problem that felt urgent in the first month feels less urgent in the fourth. Members begin attending less consistently. Contributions become thinner. The energy that was present at the start dissipates before the work is complete.

The task force that was formed to solve a three month problem takes six months to reach a conclusion. The conclusion is the same one the owner had twelve months before the task force was assembled. The total cost of the delay is nine months of unresolved problem, plus the cost of every person who sat in every meeting to arrive at an answer that was already available.

Key Takeaway: The true cost of a task force includes the onboarding time, the decision paralysis, the availability constraints, the premature attrition of members and the delay between the solution existing and the solution being implemented. This cost is almost always higher than the cost of empowering the owner to act.

Six months to reach a conclusion that existed twelve months before the task force was formed.

Think Simple · Leadership · Here is How to Think · Vol 2: The Leader · Philosophy 5: Task Force vs Owner · Section: The cost of the task force

MarvinPro | November 2025

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Why leadership misses it

Leadership does not assemble task forces because they do not trust the owner. They assemble them because they did not speak to the owner early enough to know that the owner already had the answer.

The distance between senior leadership and operational ownership is where this problem lives. In large organisations this distance is structural. Leaders operate at a level of abstraction that makes the detail of operational problems invisible until the detail becomes a number in a report or a question from a shareholder.

The owner operates at the level of the detail every day. They see the problem clearly and early. They escalate it through the available channels. But escalation in large organisations is subject to the same structural distance. The message travels upward through layers of management, each layer translating it into the language of the layer above, each translation removing some of the operational specificity that made the original escalation urgent.

By the time the problem reaches senior leadership it has been translated into a summary. The summary does not convey the full picture. Leadership sees a problem, not a solved problem waiting for a decision. They respond with a task force, because a task force is the appropriate response to an unsolved problem.

The owner watches this happen and understands exactly what went wrong. The escalation did not fail because the solution was unclear. It failed because the distance between the owner and the decision maker was too large for the full picture to travel intact.

The fix is not a better escalation process. It is a shorter distance. Senior leaders who speak directly and regularly to the owners of their critical processes will rarely need to assemble a task force. They will know what the owner knows. They will clear the bottlenecks before the shareholders notice them. And the three month problem will be solved in three months.

Key Takeaway: Leadership assembles task forces because they did not speak to the owner early enough. The structural distance between leadership and operational ownership is where problems become crises. Closing that distance is the most effective prevention available.

The escalation did not fail because the solution was unclear. It failed because the distance was too large for the full picture to travel intact.

Think Simple · Leadership · Here is How to Think · Vol 2: The Leader · Philosophy 5: Task Force vs Owner · Section: Why leadership misses it

MarvinPro | November 2025

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A real example

In a large organisation operating across multiple markets, ownership of a specific operational area had been disputed for months. Two departments each believed the responsibility belonged to the other. The result was that nobody owned it. Decisions were deferred. Issues accumulated. The area operated without clear leadership while the departments debated the boundary between them.

One leader stepped in and took ownership before it was officially assigned. Not because they were asked to. Because the area needed an owner and the cost of waiting for the formal assignment was higher than the cost of acting without it.

The underlying problem was clear within weeks. A structural change made earlier in the year had removed the team originally responsible for the work. The processes had not been fully updated to reflect the new structure. Each market was handling the same work differently, according to its own interpretation of requirements that had never been formally restated for the new environment. The legal and regulatory variation between markets added complexity that required careful mapping before a standard approach could be defined.

The owner knew what was needed. The estimate was three months. Not because the work was simple, but because the context was already there. The history was understood. The market variations were mapped. The stakeholder landscape was known. The solution was designed.

The escalation had been made. Multiple times. To the relevant stakeholders. To the line manager. The response was acknowledgement without action. The priority was elsewhere. The timing was not right.

Then the external pressure arrived. Shareholders asked questions. Leadership responded by forming a task force to address the area that the owner had been escalating for a year.

The task force needed three months to understand what the owner already knew. Then it needed another three months to design what the owner had already designed. Then it needed time to implement what the owner could have implemented from the start.

Three months became nine. The solution the task force arrived at was the solution the owner had presented a year before the task force was formed.

The owner implemented it. Because by the time the task force had finished its work the formal assignment had come through and the scope was finally clear.

The solution existed before the task force was formed. It just needed someone to clear the scope.

Think Simple · Leadership · Here is How to Think · Vol 2: The Leader · Philosophy 5: Task Force vs Owner · A real example

MarvinPro | November 2025

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Task Force vs Owner

Before you form a task force, speak to the owner.

Not to the owner's manager. Not to the summary in the report. To the person who has been closest to the problem longest and who carries the context that no task force can build in three months.

Ask them one question. What would you do if the scope was not a constraint?

The answer to that question is almost always the solution. The task force was going to arrive at it eventually. The owner arrived at it already.

The owner does not need more people in the room. They need a decision. They need the bottleneck cleared. They need the authority to act on what they already know.

Give them that and the problem is solved in three months. Assemble a task force instead and the problem is solved in nine. The solution will be the same. The cost will not be.

Before you form a task force, speak to the owner. The answer is probably already there.

Think Simple · Leadership · Here is How to Think · Vol 2: The Leader · Philosophy 5: Task Force vs Owner · Chapter Outcome

MarvinPro | November 2025

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