Years ago, I was working on a development project whose costs had gotten completely out of hand.
The contractor was also building the project in-house, which meant I had very little leverage and no obvious alternative. When I pushed back on the numbers, the answer was basically: this is what it costs.
So I did what developers do when a project is too expensive. I started value engineering. Line by line, system by system, trying to figure out where we could reduce cost without ruining the project in the process.
I spent weeks on it before I realized the biggest problem was not really a value-engineering problem at all.
We were building too much parking.
Not a little too much. Enough that the garage was forcing us to excavate an entire half level deeper than the project actually needed. That one decision was cascading through the budget: more concrete, more structural steel, more waterproofing, more time.
The parking count had been set early based on assumptions about what the market required. By the time we were trying to solve the cost problem, nobody was treating parking as a decision anymore.
It had become part of the scenery.
Treat the Given as a Variable
Once we treated the parking count as a variable again, the project changed pretty quickly.
We reduced it to what the site actually needed in an urban location with good transit access, eliminated the extra excavation, reworked the garage, and saved millions of dollars.
The team had not been wrong that costs were too high. Value engineering was a perfectly reasonable response.
We were just working one level too low.
We were trying to make the budget work inside a set of assumptions nobody was questioning.
That project taught me one of the simplest diagnostic moves I know: treat the given as a variable.
How a Choice Stops Looking Like a Choice
Most hidden obstacles are not hidden because someone is careless or dishonest. They are hidden because an assumption, decision, metric, or rule has been around long enough that everyone stops seeing it as something that could be different.
The longer that happens, the more work gets built on top of it. Eventually, the original choice disappears from view and starts functioning like reality itself.
I think about this all the time now in organizational work.
A board preference starts functioning like strategy. A legacy process starts functioning like a requirement. A founder's instinct starts functioning like market evidence. A cultural norm starts deciding what can and cannot be discussed.
None of those things is automatically wrong. The problem is when something that may have made sense once keeps carrying authority long after anyone has gone back to ask whether it still should.
That is where teams can spend enormous amounts of time solving the visible problem while the thing underneath it stays untouched.
The Question People Inside the System Stop Asking
This is one place where the jurisdiction lens in Near Enemies has become useful to me.
Sometimes the issue is not that an assumption is bad. It is that we have quietly allowed it to answer questions it no longer has the right to settle.
In this project, a parking assumption had somehow earned authority over the economics of the entire building without anyone going back to ask whether the assumption was still true.
Once you see that, the diagnostic question gets pretty simple:
What decision, made early, is still constraining everything downstream?
It can be an uncomfortable question because the answer may mean that a lot of smart, competent work has been happening at the wrong level of the problem.
That does not make the work foolish or wasted. It just means the frame needs to be reopened.
And in my experience, that is often where progress starts.
So when a problem has been worked from every angle and still refuses to move, I increasingly wonder whether the obstacle is hiding in something everyone has stopped treating as a choice.
What have you stopped questioning in your current work because it stopped feeling like a question?