Where You Apply Force Matters

Written By Jonathan Burkett

In the Marines, you learn fast that effort doesn't win anything on its own. You can have more people, more movement, more intensity — none of it matters if it's hitting the wrong spot. What wins is where you apply force. You study the terrain, you understand how the system in front of you is actually built, and you put pressure on the point that breaks it. Mass only matters when it's focused. Without that, it's just noise.

That thinking doesn't leave you. Over time, you start treating every problem like a system to understand rather than something to manage around. That lens makes it pretty obvious how Revenue Cycle tends to operate when things are going sideways. The response is almost always automatic: AR goes up, hire a vendor. Denials spike, add staff. Cash slows, expand coverage. It looks like progress because there's more activity. More people. More motion. But the results don't actually change — and if you're being honest with yourself, you already knew that.

The same accounts come back. The same problems cycle through. The pressure rebuilds right on schedule as the next quarter closes in. I see this constantly in my role leading support and IT optimization for our clients. These aren't undisciplined teams. They're not lazy. Most of the time they're working as hard as the system will let them. That's exactly the problem — the system was never designed to produce a different result. So all that effort gets absorbed, and nothing moves.

Here's what that looks like in practice. Workflows grow over time with no real structure holding them together. Rules that should be built into the system live inside people's heads instead. Work queues fill up — not just with what's necessary, but with what has accumulated. Tasks that exist because they always have, not because they still should. Problems that originate upstream move quietly through the process until they surface downstream as rework, delays, or denials. By the time anyone sees them, the only play left is to respond manually. And when manual response is your only lever, you pull it. You add people. It feels like the right call because it's the only call available.

What that creates is a situation where effort keeps climbing and direction never changes. The system runs the same patterns. The standard responses reinforce them. After a while it starts to feel normal — but what it actually is, is a cycle where you need more energy just to hold your current position. Nobody's asking whether the system itself should change. That question doesn't even make it into the room.

That's where the conversation about technology — AI specifically — actually matters. But not the way it usually gets pitched. The value isn't in running the same broken process faster. It's in stepping back and asking why so much of that work exists in the first place. When you look at it that way, the system starts to show you things you can't see from inside the day-to-day grind. Decisions that vary person to person are obvious candidates for standardization. Repetitive work that burns time without adding anything is a target for elimination. Entire categories of work stop looking like requirements and start looking like what they are — artifacts of a system that was never fully thought through.

Fix those things, and the work changes. Volume drops. What's left is actually worth doing and clearly owned. Instead of spreading effort across everything, you can put it where human judgment genuinely matters. The system gets quieter. More predictable. Not because you pushed harder — because you finally stopped pushing in the wrong places.

At that point, the parallel is hard to miss. The problem was never a shortage of effort. It wasn't even a shortage of people. It was a shortage of focus on where that effort should actually go. Change that, and the system starts behaving differently. The constant pressure to add capacity starts to ease.

Until that happens, the cycle just runs. More pressure, more activity, more headcount — same problems moving through the same system. It feels productive for a minute. Then the quarter ends and you're right back where you started.

If you want a different result, adding more effort to the same system isn't going to get you there.

You have to change where you apply force. And more importantly, you have to change the system that's been pointing it in the wrong direction the whole time.