Across many organisations, people are working harder while progress feels slower. Priorities shift, attention becomes fragmented, and meetings, reporting and constant availability consume growing amounts of capacity. People remain busy, but too much of their energy goes into navigating the organisation rather than creating value. This keynote challenges the tendency to treat productivity, overload and burnout primarily as people issues. Resilience, wellbeing and individual effectiveness matter, but they cannot compensate for unclear direction, weak governance, interruption or ways of working designed around narrow assumptions of how people perform. We'll explore 4 common sources of wasted human energy: organisational drift, complexity without governance, inefficient effort and biased work design. Through concrete organisational situations and practical leadership questions, it examines how leaders can identify friction, remove unnecessary work, clarify decision ownership and create the conditions for sustainable performance. Key takeaways: - Recognise where organisational friction is quietly consuming capacity and undermining performance. - Identify the ways shifting priorities, unclear ownership and fragmented attention create activity without sufficient value. - Use practical leadership questions to translate identified bottlenecks into concrete organisational action. - Explore how better work design can strengthen performance, reducing unnecessary cognitive load.