On the surface it is business as usual. Everything runs. Profits are up. And still you carry this low, nagging sense that a thousand small things are pushing you toward a breaking point you cannot quite name. If you know that feeling, you are not alone. The catch is that we are usually too close to it to see it.
I want to tell you two stories. One is personal and slightly embarrassing. The other is a client. They are the same story.
The four months I stopped
Over the past four months I barely shot a single video. It was not one thing. It never is.
It started when the building I live in went into renovation and I lost the connection to my safe place. Then came a run of small equipment friction: a camera that kept overheating, editing software that decided to stop showing audio waveforms, the kind of papercuts that each cost an hour and none of which is worth complaining about on its own. Around the same time I was rebuilding my marketing with two consultants, where results come neither fast nor easy. And I had signed up for a D3 certification, which was genuinely useful and also became one more unfinished thing to hide behind.
None of it arrived at once. Each cut landed before I had recovered from the last, but with just enough time in between that I never connected them. So I recalibrated. Every new limitation became the new normal. My perception quietly shifted into safe mode, and I started making decisions I would not have made under normal conditions. My own strengths turned on me: perfectionism and attention to detail, usually assets, became reasons to stall.
Death by a thousand cuts
There is a name for this. Death by a thousand cuts. The academics call the gentler version creeping normality, and the harder-edged management version normalization of deviance, a term coined while studying the Challenger disaster, where an organization slowly accepted warning signs as routine until the routine turned fatal.
The mechanism is always the same. A change you would reject instantly if it happened overnight becomes acceptable when it arrives one slice at a time, like salami. Because it creeps, you fold it into daily life without protest. That is exactly what makes it dangerous. And if you ignore it long enough, the cuts reach critical mass, and recovery is neither quick nor cheap.
The client who was about to hit an iceberg
Now the same pattern in a business. A client came to me with one specific problem. I started digging, because that is the job, and found they were heading straight for an iceberg.
Their internal sales system was choking and could not keep up with demand. The infrastructure needed a serious overhaul. Product teams were stepping on each other and creating tension at the infrastructure level. There were budget constraints, so not everything could be fixed at once. And they were easy prey for IT sales reps selling them smoke and mirrors, which, unfortunately, still happens every day.
Here is the twist. They were a functional, profitable company. Growing, slowly, but growing. They had accepted every one of those limitations one slice at a time until the whole set felt normal. On a subconscious level it was throttling them every single day. I know this because once we fixed the infrastructure and digitalized what needed digitalizing, the company started breathing differently. Same people, same market. It just started working.
Why you cannot see your own version
You will not spot this on your own. You are too biased and too close, and it gets harder still when the problem sits outside your expertise. I am not a marketing expert, so my marketing blind spots were invisible to me. My client did not live in IT, so their IT iceberg was invisible to them. That is not a failing. It is just how blind spots work.
What saved me was someone outside nudging me. My marketing person kept asking why no videos were going out, why the posts had stopped. That outside question is what finally connected the dots. I did exactly the same thing for my client, from the other side of the desk.
How to break the circle
If you recognize this, here is the way out. It works like recovery from procrastination.
First you have to actually decide to end it, then start. Build an overview so you can see the whole thing at once. A kanban board is perfect for this. Then work the items one by one and protect your cadence, because you will be tempted to stop halfway, and your mind will happily invent fresh reasons to postpone. Expect that. Expect too that you will not be satisfied with early results, because you will want it all fixed instantly and it will not be. Recovery takes real time and real effort. The one mercy is that the sooner you start, the less exponential the cleanup.
The takeaway
Creeping normality lives in both your personal and your business life, and the personal side leaks into the business more than you would like. You will rarely catch it yourself. So every so often you need a competent pair of eyes that is not you and not biased by your organization to come in, look, and tell you what is broken or about to break. A periodic check-up, the same way you would with your health.
That outside look at the technical side of a business is what I do. If you want one, you know where to find me.
