When I was little, I had a doll I called My Little Brother Matthew. He had a soft cotton-stuffed body and stiff plastic arms. I adored him. I made him little custom outfits with scraps of fabric and markers stitched together with staples. Don’t judge. I was a child with a vision and limited resources.
I took Matthew everywhere. And over time, Matthew’s arms began to loosen from his fabric body. He was hurt! So I used what I had: Band-Aids. I patched him up with neon Band-Aids. When one started to peel off, I’d just layer on another. They were everywhere. At one point, his little shoulder was a tower of Band-Aids. I wasn’t fixing the problem. I wasn’t ignoring it either. I was just hiding it with cuteness and hope.
Over the past 13 years, I have seen a lot of My Little Brother Matthew energy.
Instead of stepping back to find the root of the problem, people are layering on quick fixes. A new tool. A quick spreadsheet. A pieced-together system. A form someone copied from another org that seems like it’ll do the job.
Here’s the truth: a Band-Aid doesn’t become a solution just because you’ve stacked a bunch of them together.
Quick fixes feel good… until they don’t.
In the moment, a quick fix feels like momentum. Something got done. Holes were patched. A to-do marked as complete. But without a strategy, these fixes don’t build anything. They just hold things in place until a new crack forms. Then you find yourself right back in the same place, more exhausted than before.
Here’s what I want you to know:
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You’re not failing because you’ve used quick fixes. We’ve all put a Band-Aid on something to get through the week. You did what you had to do.
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If everything feels fragile, it’s time to pause. The longer you delay a strategic approach, the more time and energy you’ll spend reacting instead of building.
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You don’t have to burn it all down. Strategic solutions don’t mean starting from scratch. You can work with what they already have and shape it into something sustainable.