The 2 AM Trap

A business strategy is only as strong as the floorboards it stands on. In this new series, we explore why Service Management’s six Critical Capabilities are the essential foundation for any modern transformation. Learn to move past 'hero culture' and build a structural framework ready for the high-speed demands of AI.

The reality of a big strategy often reveals itself in the quietest moments.

2:00 AM: The Hallway Squeak

I hit that one floorboard in the hallway—the one that gives a sharp, familiar shriek if you don’t catch it just right. The house was dead quiet until that second. I froze in the dark, waiting to see if I’d woken the household, and I realised I’ve lived here so long that stepping over the soft spots has become a habit. It is pure muscle memory. Most of the leaders I talk to are doing the exact same thing in their own organisations. They know where the floors are weak, and they’ve spent years learning how to walk around the problems without making a sound.

2:03 AM: The Pretty Pictures

I see it every week in boardrooms. We sit and look at transformation roadmaps that look like works of art. They are filled with big promises about synergy and speed. (The deck always has a name like Project Genesis, and everyone in the room is trying very hard not to look at the ceiling.) The problem is that these roadmaps rarely mention the rotten joists.

We keep ourselves busy with the big, shiny projects because looking at the actual foundations feels too small, or maybe just a bit too embarrassing to admit. So, instead of fixing the structure, we rely on heroes. We have those three people who know exactly which parts of the floor to avoid and how to keep the lights on. We treat their overtime as a badge of honour.

Relying on heroes means you are just using your best people as glue to hold a broken floor together. Eventually, those people get tired and they leave. Then you are left with a hole in the floor and nobody left who knows how to dodge it. This is why your costs stay high and your change feels so slow. You are trying to move at speed in a house held together by luck, and eventually, you run out of floor. Especially now, as AI pushes the rate of change even higher. You can’t match the speed of a machine when your own structure is still relying on a few exhausted people to stop the floor from collapsing.

2:05 AM: The Stuff Under the Floor

I’m standing in the kitchen, waiting for the water to get cold. It hits me: we don’t think about the floor until it breaks.

But everything you care about—your family, your furniture, and your future—is held up by beams you haven't looked at in ten years. Service Management is just like that. It is the literal floor that your whole business walks on. If you try to move a heavy sofa across a hallway with rotten wood, the floor is the problem, not the sofa. You can’t move fast if you are constantly worried about falling through the boards.

To have a floor that can actually hold the weight, you need more than just a new rug. You need the beams underneath to be solid. We look at six Critical Capabilities. These are the main supports that keep the whole house standing.

2:08 AM: Finding the Soft Spots

We call them "Critical" because they aren't just extra features or nice-to-have tools. They are the framework that determines whether your strategy stands or falls. If you ignore these beams, you don't just get "slow IT"—you get a business that can't move. You end up spending all your money just trying to keep the floor from falling in, instead of building anything new.

This is the start of a series where my colleagues and I will break down these six areas as a diagnostic check:

• The Modern Service Desk: Stop using your best staff as glue for broken processes.
• Omni-Channel Self-Service: Stop forcing your customers to wait for a person every time they need a simple answer.
• Digital Service Operations: Build a nervous system instead of waiting for the phone to ring.
• Asset Management Excellence: Base your strategic decisions on facts, not facts you just made up.
• Enterprise Service Management: Get work flowing instead of ricocheting between silos like a pinball.
• Agile Change Management: Make your change boring and safe, not thrilling and expensive.

2:10 AM: Mapping the Fix

The process for fixing this begins with your business initiatives—whether you are focused on cost, customer experience, or handling a major merger. We use an AI-led maturity assessment to scan your actual data and generate a clear scorecard of where you stand. This replaces opinion with facts, identifying the specific "hotspots" that are holding you back. From there, we build a 12-month roadmap that prioritises the work needed to uplift these capabilities and tie them directly to the outcomes you need to hit. It turns a messy backlog into a clear, executable plan.

By the way: Getting these right is also the only way you ever get ready for AI. AI is an accelerator, but it cannot talk to folklore. It needs the foundations to be real. If you try to put AI on top of a rotten floor, it will just fall through.

2:12 AM: Heading Back to Bed

I’ve got my water and I’m heading back to bed. I stepped over the squeak on the way back out of habit.
Still dark out. Knowing the UK, it’ll likely be chucking it down by the time the alarm goes. We’ll put on our suits, head to the office, and look at those beautiful roadmap slides again. It’s easy to ignore the rot when the lights are on. But the floor is still soft, and the dark always comes back.

It is time to decide if you want to keep getting better at dodging the holes, or if you are finally ready to fix the joists.

6:13 AM: Wake Up to Reality

The alarm is going off and it’s chucking it down outside. Back to the suit and the commute—but before the "pretty pictures" take over your morning, take a hard look at that one project you’re worried about. Decide if it's a strategy problem or a floorboard problem.

Try this:

1. Identify the hero: Name the one person whose exhaustion is the only thing keeping a process alive.
2. Face the risk: Recognise what happens to your big strategy if that person leaves tomorrow.
3. Pick a beam: Look at the six areas above and find the one currently screaming under the weight of your goals.

It is time to stop calling a hole in the floor a strategy. Naming the squeak is the only way to start fixing it.
Best regards,

Keyvan Shirnia
Chief Revenue Officer (and part-time 2 AM floorboard analyst)