🧟 Killing Zombie Work

Once upon a time we felt we were doing things didn’t matter. Status updates for work no one would use. Initiatives kept alive by habit or politics. Reports pulled because “we’ve always sent them around here”. We were exhausted, yet nothing meaningful seemed to come out. To the point someone said it out loud in a retro: “We’re doing zombie work.”

We all laughed….then we went quiet. Because it was funny yet undeniably true.

The symptoms you probably recognize

• Endless Work in Progress (WIP): too many initiatives, all “in progress,” none delivered.

• Stakeholder theater: updates performed for things no one has asked about it in months.

• Legacy obligations: recurring activities with no owner or anyone who can explain “why.”

• No clean stops: initiatives lingering for quarters because stopping them is socially harder than keeping them alive.

• Velocity masking value: lots of output, little impact.

That’s when some of us decided to try an attempt to stop the zombie work: