Is Your Team Rock Pushing or Domino Building?
Has work ever felt like pushing a rock uphill ?
You are sweating.
Putting your energy into moving it forward.
But the moment you stop pushing, it starts rolling backward again.
In the previous blog post, I wrote about weak continuity and why teams get trapped in restart cycles.
This week, I want to look at the opposite pattern.
Because healthy momentum doesn't feel like pushing a rock uphill.
It feels more like a line of dominoes.
Each effort changes the starting point of the next one until momentum becomes larger than any individual push.
Most organizations think progress comes from pushing harder.
More urgency.
More follow-up.
More accountability.
More meetings.
But that's pure rock pushing.
Meaning the effort has to be recreated every time.
Momentum works differently.
Like dominoes, each effort leaves something behind that helps move the next one forward.
Let's break down why that matters for modern work.
Why Continuity beats intensity
If modern work was a domino chain, most organizations would focus on building a larger starting domino.
More resources.
More urgency.
An all-hands effort.
Late nights.
Heroics.
The assumption is simple: a bigger push will create a bigger impact.
It looks like something important is moving… but if that large domino only knocks over the next two before the chain breaks, someone has to stop and tilt the next domino manually.
That is what weak continuity feels like.
Projects move.
Then stall.
Decisions get made.
Then need to be revisited.
Ownership gets assigned.
Then has to be clarified again.
Eventually, teams spend more energy rebuilding momentum than benefiting from it.
That's what rock pushing feels like.
Even when the launch happens, the deadline is met, or the project finally goes live, there is mostly a mix of relief, frustration and exhaustion.
That’s why, over time, people burn out, leave or disengage. Rock pushing isn’t sustainable.
People who build domino chains think differently.
They spend most of their attention on strategically placing the dominoes.
They know the first push is not the most important part, the real question is whether the momentum reaches the next domino.
And the next one.
And the next one.
Domino builders also know chains break sometimes despite effort so they pay attention to vulnerable points and create recovery chains to help momentum continue. (It is called a firebreak)
Their focus isn't on creating bigger pushes.
It's on preserving continuity.
Not large or forceful movement.
Not movement for the sake of it.
The repeated transfer of movement.
Because when the dominoes are placed well, the chain can become surprisingly powerful.
One domino gets hit.
It tilts.
It falls on the next one
and the momentum grows faster and stronger.
That is why continuity beats intensity.
The power is not in the push.
It is in everything that happens afterward.
What This Looks Like At Work
In humans, continuity exists because of integration.
We allow the change created by one experience to influence the next one.
For example, when we learn something new, the lesson itself is only the activation.
We practice
then we integrate.
We experiment
then we integrate.
Each effort changes the starting point of the next one until the change becomes part of who we are.
In an organization, a meeting can create (re)activation.
Attention gathers.
Conversations happen.
Decisions get made.
But momentum does not come from the meeting itself.
Momentum comes from what happens afterward.
People need time to turn those decisions into reality.
For ownership to become action.
For understanding to become behavior.
For plans to become reality.
And that process is often far less visible than the meeting itself, which is where many organizations struggle.
Because organizations often respond to weak continuity by creating more activation.
More meetings.
More updates.
More check-ins.
More deadlines.
But doing the work and creating visibility around the work are two different activities.
So as coordination increases, it often leaves less space for the work itself. (I explain this in more details in a previous post on The Cost of Bad Meetings.)
The result is that work keeps getting activated without ever being fully integrated.
Which creates more activation.
More coordination.
And eventually, overwhelm.
Because human beings can only integrate so much change at once.
When an activation feels manageable, people can absorb it, work with it, and build on it.
When it feels overwhelming, much of that energy goes toward coping with the activation itself rather than integrating it.
So at that point, the system starts working against itself.
The organization keeps creating more activation.
The people stop integrating it.
They tune it out.
Push back against it.
Or simply try to get through it.
How Momentum Does More With Less Effort
There is a big difference between intensity and momentum.
Intensity can get work moving.
Momentum allows it to keep moving.
One relies on repeated effort.
The other relies on effort building on itself.
The effort still matters.
But the goal is not to keep supplying the same effort forever.
And that energy can then be reinvested into better thinking, better decisions, and better work.
That is why continuity is rarely dramatic. From the outside, it can look like almost nothing is happening.
People are simply working.
Decisions hold.
Projects move forward.
The handoff works.
Fewer escalations.
Fewer restarts.
Fewer heroic recoveries.
But because activation is louder and more visible, it tends to get most of the attention.
We celebrate the launch. Not the months of continuity that supported it.
And when things go wrong, we blame the team that didn't push hard enough.
Both reactions focus on the activation.
Rarely on the continuity that was—or wasn't—there to support the outcome.
The decisions that held.
The ownership that stayed clear.
The work that quietly kept moving.
Because if momentum is really a continuity problem, then pushing harder is not the only option.
There is another way.
One that focuses less on creating activation and more on creating the conditions for momentum to emerge in the first place.
Closing
If your organization depends on daily heroics to keep moving, the problem may not be effort.
It may be continuity.
The Momentum Series helps teams build the structures that allow momentum to survive between meetings.
