Not the obvious ones. The quieter spaces where something is missing, but the system still appears to function. Where people are busy, well intentioned, and doing their best, while quietly compensating for something nobody has named.

One of those gaps became very clear in a process I was asked to spend some time with recently.

The business had done what it believed was the responsible thing. Time and care had gone into producing a detailed specification internally. Requirements were thought through. Edge cases captured. Decisions signed off. On paper, it looked solid.

And yet, the same questions kept resurfacing. Clarifications. Reinterpretations. Small misunderstandings that did not feel serious enough to escalate, but persistent enough to slow things down. Nothing dramatic. Just enough friction to make the work heavier than it needed to be.

It would have been easy to pin that on execution. Or communication. Or individuals not reading closely enough. That is usually where these conversations drift.

But sitting with it for a while, something else felt off.

The specification was doing its job inside the business. It created confidence. It reduced perceived risk. It allowed decisions to move forward. Once it crossed the boundary to the delivery team, though, it became something different. A document to interpret. To infer from. To work around.

No one had failed. The gap sat between contexts.

I keep noticing how much effort agencies put into every client interaction.
Everything is treated as high stakes, high touch, and deeply personal.

It comes from a good place. No team wants to feel like they are giving clients a thin or automated experience.

But over time I’ve started to question whether all of that effort is actually valuable.

Some interactions genuinely benefit from care and judgement. Others mainly need to be accurate and delivered when promised.

When those two types of interaction get treated the same way, it usually causes problems. Senior people get buried in admin, and the moments that really need judgement get squeezed.

I see this most clearly in delivery work.

When delivery starts to feel harder than it should, most agency leaders do the same thing. They look for clarity.

Not a reset. Not a wholesale change. Just something sensible to read that might explain why plans keep slipping, why outcomes still surprise people, and why teams feel busy without things becoming more predictable.

So they search for a guide. Often something like “mastering agency project management in 2026”.

What they find looks reassuring. Long, confident, recently updated. Full of methods, tools, templates, and best practice. It reads like a comprehensive answer to a complicated problem.

It feels current. It feels responsible. It feels like the right thing to be reading and taking action on.

Months pass. Planning is still slow. Risks are noticed early but only discussed once they start affecting delivery. Outcomes still surprise people who believed they had done the right preparation.

That pattern is worth paying attention to.

How many complex things can a human do at the same time?

It’s not a trick question. The answer likely came to you immediately. Correct, it’s one.

Doing more than one complex thing at the same time leads to terrible outcomes. Take driving and using a mobile phone as the extreme example.

In product teams — who often focus on a single goal for many weeks at a time — there are strict limits on work in progress. A person can be assigned to only one thing. Teams work on one thing per team member, minus one thing to ensure redundancy.

In agencies these rules are often less clearly defined, and sometimes don’t exist. People are commonly multi-assigned. They could be spending time across two or more projects, while also covering support agreement work.

It’s not uncommon for me to see people assigned to ten or more tickets. Yes 1-0, ten.