— Opinion column by manufacturing expert Buckley Brinkman
How many times do you reach the end of a day — or a week, or a month — exhausted and wondering what you actually accomplished? It’s a frustrating feeling, especially when you worked hard and gave everything you had.
You’ve fallen into the Whirlwind: the convergence of daily tasks, responsibilities, and expectations into one giant cloud of chaos. No process, plan, standard, or skill at your disposal can fully protect you from the real world and its demands. Getting the day job done is hard enough. Creating the innovation and transformation these times require can feel impossible.
But there is a way out. And as the leader, breaking free is your job.
Recently, I heard Chris McChesney of FranklinCovey lay out three distinct categories of professional work: the Whirlwind, Stroke of the Pen, and Plus One. Sometimes a little structure makes a huge difference. This is one of those times.
Splitting work into these three categories helped me understand the challenges every leader faces — and gave me a framework for breaking out of routine and directing energy toward more productive outcomes. Here is what I learned.
The Whirlwind covers everything that keeps your day-to-day business running: phone calls, meetings, paperwork, customer issues, and crisis management. The best leaders build routines and processes that minimize fires, eliminate variation, and codify the most effective ways to execute recurring tasks Still, the Whirlwind has a dangerous tendency: it expands to fill every available moment. Left unmanaged, it will consume your entire day — every day.
Stroke of the Pen initiatives occupy a different category. Leaders can make these changes through direct action alone — launching a new marketing campaign by hiring an outside firm, for example. The lift is relatively light, engagement outside the executive suite is minimal, and the path from decision to execution is short. These are real moves, but not transformational ones.
Plus One is where organizations make their most significant leaps — and where most leaders struggle. These are the initiatives that change your company’s trajectory – building new capabilities, launching new products, opening new markets. They require focus, broad buy-in, and a strong set of change management skills. The name comes from research showing that organizations concentrating on two to three strategic priorities succeed far more often than those pursuing many initiatives at once. The most successful organizations attack the Whirlwind alongside just one additional initiative at a time — the Whirlwind, Plus One.
What separates Plus One work from the Whirlwind is the nature of the work itself. Transformation demands creativity, continuous experimentation, genuine teamwork, and mutual accountability. It requires people to lean into the work, not just execute it. Get those elements working together and watch your organization reach goals that once seemed beyond reach.
Plus One work also does something unexpected – it provides relief from the Whirlwind. Your people want to do meaningful work, contribute to a winning team, and have a voice in shaping the organization. The Plus One structure creates the conditions for all of that. Weekly team meetings sharpen accountability around one essential question:
What are the one or two things I can do this week to move our team closer to our goal?
That question is simple. Its impact is not. The people doing front-line work know what needs to change, how to change it, and what the payoff will look like. These weekly sessions — and the actions that emerge from them — build an environment where employees drive real change. Paradoxically, this deliberate time away from the Whirlwind makes leaders and their teams more effective within it.
Here is your challenge.
Take an honest look at your organization this week. Count your active strategic initiatives. If you have more than three, you have too many. Pick the one with the greatest potential to change your trajectory. Rally your team around it. Run the Plus One process with discipline.
Stop stewing about not accomplishing enough. Start building the structure that makes transformation inevitable.
