The Lie of Continuous Improvement
- Sarah Gruneisen
- Feb 9
- 4 min read
Why most teams optimize themselves into exhaustion
There’s a moment in many conversations where I feel those in the room lean forward, not because something complex was said, but because something simple finally named what everyone has been living.
In this conversation, that moment came when I reached for a metaphor I often use to explain the difference between single loop and double loop learning.
Not because it’s clever.
But because it’s uncomfortable.
The toothbrush moment (and why it matters)
Imagine you want to leave the house faster in the morning.
So you optimize.
You buy a faster toothbrush.
You shave seconds off brushing.
You streamline tiny steps here and there.
But you never ask the real question:
Why am I running up and down the stairs five times in the first place?
That’s single loop learning.
It improves within the system,
while protecting the system from being questioned.
Double loop learning does something far more threatening.
It asks whether the system itself still makes sense.
When I shared this example, it wasn’t about toothbrushes.
It was about how organizations survive by never zooming out far enough to challenge their own assumptions.
Why single loop learning feels safer
Most organizations are built to reward optimization, not reflection.
Single loop learning:
🖤 keeps people busy
🖤 looks productive
🖤 doesn’t threaten hierarchy
🖤 doesn’t expose sunk costs
🖤 doesn’t ask who decided this in the first place
It allows leaders to say, “We’re improving,”
without ever asking, “Improving toward what?”
Double loop learning, on the other hand, asks questions that redistribute power:
🔥 Why are we still measuring this?
🔥 Who benefits from this process?
🔥 What are we optimizing for?
🔥 What are we afraid to stop doing?
These aren’t process questions.
They’re authority questions.
The real blocker isn’t intelligence, it’s permission
What Igor named, and what I see everywhere, is this:
Teams already know.
They see which metrics stopped being useful months ago.
They feel where energy is being wasted.
They recognize duplicated effort and outdated priorities.
What they often lack is permission.
Permission to question assumptions without being labeled “difficult.”
Permission to stop optimizing something leadership is emotionally attached to.
Permission to say, “This no longer serves the outcome we claim to want.”
So instead, teams retreat into local optimization.
Not because it’s effective,
but because it’s survivable.
Visibility is not control, unless leaders turn it into one
One of the most quietly radical insights in this conversation was this:
If processes and metrics are hidden in the office of the CTO, only the CTO gets to think.
Everyone else executes.
That’s not leadership.
That’s cognitive hoarding.
When teams are given visibility into the whole, value streams, dependencies, trade-offs, they don’t become chaotic.
They become curious.
They ask better questions:
❤️🔥 Why does this still matter?
❤️🔥 What happens if we stop?
❤️🔥 What is the opportunity cost of chasing the last 20%?
And this is where fear often shows up in leadership.
Because visibility feels like loss of control
to leaders who confuse authority with isolation.
The fetishization of the last 20%
We talked explicitly about the final stretch, the last bit of optimization.
The last 20%.
That last 20% is often:
🖤 the most expensive
🖤 the most draining
🖤 the least impactful
And yet organizations cling to it.
Because stopping feels like failure.
Because letting go feels like admitting the past no longer applies.
Double loop learning asks a taboo question:
What if “good enough” is not the enemy, but the doorway to something more meaningful?
This isn’t laziness.
It’s discernment.
Why this threatens leaders more than teams
Let’s name the quiet truth.
Double loop learning doesn’t scare teams.
It scares leaders.
Because it requires:
💚 justifying priorities instead of defending them
💚 retiring pet metrics
💚 admitting that some past decisions no longer make sense
It replaces certainty with stewardship.
And stewardship demands humility.
The cost of never zooming out
When teams are trapped in single loop learning long enough, something breaks.
Not loudly.
Not immediately.
People stop caring beyond their ticket.
Innovation turns into compliance.
“Continuous improvement” becomes ritualized exhaustion.
And leadership says:
“Teams lack ownership.”
No.
Ownership was optimized out of them.
A question I’ll leave you with
If your teams are endlessly improving tasks but nothing truly changes, ask yourself:
🔥 What assumptions are off-limits?
🔥 What metrics are we afraid to retire?
🔥 Who benefits from keeping the system unquestioned?
🔥 And what might happen if we trusted teams enough to zoom out?
Because the biggest gains rarely come from faster toothbrushes.
They come from finally questioning
why we’re running up and down the stairs at all.
And that kind of learning doesn’t just change processes.
It changes who gets to think.
🐉 Dragon Insight: The dragon of optimization
Every organization has a dragon.
It doesn’t breathe fire.
It breathes optimization.
This dragon whispers:
🐲 “Just a little faster.”
🐲 “Just one more metric.”
🐲 “Just refine this part a bit more.”
🐲 “Don’t question the whole, that’s risky.”
At first, this dragon is useful.
It keeps things moving.
It protects against chaos.
It rewards precision.
But dragons that are never challenged eventually stop guarding progress
and start guarding the system itself.
Single loop learning feeds this dragon endlessly.
Better toothbrushes.
Shaved seconds.
More dashboards.
Double loop learning does something braver.
It looks the dragon in the eye and asks:
“What are you protecting, and at what cost?”
The dragon isn’t evil.
It’s afraid.
Afraid that if we stop optimizing, we’ll lose control.
Afraid that if we zoom out, we’ll have to admit some things no longer make sense.
Afraid that if teams start questioning assumptions, authority will shift.
But here’s the paradox:
A dragon that never lets the system be questioned
eventually burns the very people it was meant to protect.
Real leadership doesn’t slay this dragon.
It listens to it.
Learns what it’s guarding.
And then chooses when to let it rest.
Because the greatest transformations don’t come from tighter control.
They come from the courage to step back,
spread your wings,
and allow the system, and the people in it,
to think again.
That’s when the dragon stops guarding the stairs
and finally learns to fly. 🐉✨
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