Significant work is hard; illusion is easy
Doing anything significant has always been painful. Creating the appearance of progress is now cheaper. Humans will usually choose the lesser pain.
Doing anything significant has always been hard and painful. Creating illusions of progress has become much easier. Humans will always tend to choose the lesser pain. That is why metrics, media buzz, and performance of concern can crowd out the slower work of implementation.
Any plan we make still dies or lives in execution. We need to study why existing missions and initiatives failed to produce the results they advertised, and how real work gets done instead of a calendar of announcements. Without that discipline, we will keep preferring the illusion because it hurts less in the short term.
From X
Derived from posts on X as devendrasm: