Your executive team is a Rube Goldberg machine.
Picture this: A marble rolls down a ramp, hits a seesaw, which catapults a toy car into a row of books, which topple onto a mousetrap, which launches a ball into a bucket, which pulls a string that finally… turns off a light switch.
Welcome to the beautiful absurdity of a Rube Goldberg machine.
These contraptions are masterpieces of over-engineering—taking 47 steps to accomplish what your finger could do in one. But here’s the thing: every wild, winding chain reaction is 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘺 how executive teams actually develop.
Your leadership team isn’t IKEA furniture. You can’t just follow the manual, tighten a few bolts, and expect it to function perfectly.
Teams are living Rube Goldberg machines.
A heated budget meeting triggers vulnerability. That vulnerability deepens trust. The deeper trust unlocks honest feedback. The feedback reveals a blind spot. The blind spot gets addressed, which shifts team dynamics. The shift creates space for innovation. The innovation leads to breakthrough results.
None of it follows your neat development plan. The “marble” of growth ricochets through unexpected channels, knocking over assumptions, setting off chain reactions you never saw coming.
Most leaders panic when team development gets messy. They try to shortcut the process, force linear progress, or scrap the whole thing when it doesn’t go according to plan.
But what if the chaos is the plan?
What if your team’s seemingly random setbacks, breakthroughs, and sideways progress aren’t bugs in the system—but features of how real growth actually works?
The most powerful teams I work with have learned to design for the beautiful mess. They build in space for the marble to bounce around. They trust the process even when they can’t see the end result.
Because just like that ridiculous light-switch machine, the most important transformations happen through the journey itself—not despite it.
Your team isn’t broken. It’s just…wonderfully, chaotically human.
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