… my teams were drowning in incidents, escalations, and tech debt — none of which showed up on the roadmap. Nearly half their time, if not more was going there.
… But the iceberg was invisible. Nobody had named it.
And until you name it, you can’t lead through it.
link pro Jung aqui…
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
― Carl Jung
Why this matters
Ignore the iceberg, and here’s what happens:
- Unrealistic expectations. Leaders plan for 100% strategy. In reality, 40–60% of capacity is consumed by hidden work.
- Burnout. Teams feel like they’re failing at things they never had time for.
- Erosion of trust. Leaders think teams are slow. Teams think leaders are delusional.
- Chaos compounding. As one commenter on LinkedIn put it: “After 100M the iceberg just gets bigger.” The more you scale, the heavier the weight beneath the surface.
Here’s what I’ve seen work:
- Map all the work. Not just the shiny bets. Include debt, incidents, compliance, escalations. You can’t lead what you can’t see.
- Plan with reality. If your history shows 40% hidden work, plan for it. Stop pretending you get 100% capacity for strategy.
- Rebalance quarterly. The iceberg shifts. Treat it as living, not fixed.
- Celebrate invisible wins. Cut incident response time by 30%? Paid down scaling debt? That is strategy. Name it and celebrate it.
- Talk openly about trade-offs. Prioritization is not about squeezing in more. It’s about making it explicit what won’t get done — and why.
The lesson
Execution isn’t hard because teams don’t know how to build. Execution is hard because the hidden weight underneath strategy is relentless.
Because the question isn’t: How do we avoid the iceberg?
We can’t.
The real question is: How do we lead knowing it’s there?