At HBR.org, the team was seeing the real impact of this negative feedback loop: they had a huge backlog of work that they had previously agreed to, and every stakeholder in the business had his or her own backlog of work that they’d not yet been able to get into the queue. A review of the queue showed that there was more than two years of work backed up—it was 2016, and there were tickets waiting in the queue that had been submitted in 2014! They needed to break the cycle.
