Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

“You can circle an organization for years, on schedule and by the book, and never once touch what makes it work — or fail,” Michel Paquin

The story

We had a few hours in Cádiz in Spain, so we did what everyone does: bought tickets for the hop-on-hop-off bus. Sit back, let the recorded voice narrate, watch the city scroll by.

Except the bus never actually went into the old town. It couldn’t. The streets there predate cars by a few centuries — they were built for people on foot, not vehicles designed to move groups of tourists comfortably. So the bus circled the perimeter: the marina, the newer avenues, the wide boulevards where a bus fits. Everything worth seeing — the cathedral, the narrow lanes, the plazas where the city actually happens — sat untouched in the middle, reachable only by getting off and walking.

You could ride that bus for the full loop, take your photos, and genuinely believe you’d seen Cádiz. You’d have covered ground. You’d have a full afternoon accounted for. And you’d have missed the city entirely.

I call this the Perimeter Tour — when a comfortable structure keeps you moving without ever taking you where the value actually is.

The bus wasn’t built for this

Nobody designed the hop-on-hop-off bus to fail Cádiz. It’s built for scale, safety, timetables. Wide turns. Predictable stops. It does its job well — it’s just that its job and “showing you the city” quietly stopped being the same thing the moment the map included those narrow streets.

Organizations build their own version of that bus constantly. The all-hands update. The dashboard review. The quarterly site visit where leadership tours every location on a tight schedule and shakes the right hands. None of it is dishonest. All of it is real infrastructure, built for real reasons — scale, consistency, optics that matter. But none of it was built to go where the actual friction lives.

The comfort is the trap

The dangerous part isn’t that the bus misses the old town. It’s that riding it feels like you’ve arrived. You checked the box. You have the photos. Nobody on that bus experiences the trip as incomplete.

“The perimeter tour doesn’t feel like avoidance. It feels like due diligence,” Michel Paquin.

That’s what makes it durable inside companies. A leader who tours every regional office in a week isn’t cutting corners by any obvious measure — they’re working hard, covering ground, being visible. The tour has all the markers of thoroughness. What it lacks is the one thing thoroughness was supposed to produce: contact with where the real work, and the real trouble, actually sits.

Walking is a different kind of effort

Getting off the bus in Cádiz meant no more narration, no more schedule, no more guarantee you’d end up somewhere interesting. It meant asking a stranger for directions in a language you don’t speak well, backtracking twice, sweating through a hot afternoon.

It’s the same trade inside a transformation. Walking the floor instead of reading the report. Sitting in on the actual handoff instead of the meeting about the handoff. Asking the person doing the work what breaks, instead of asking their manager what’s reported as broken. It’s slower. It’s less controlled. It doesn’t fit neatly into a slide.

But it’s the only way anyone ever actually sees Cádiz.

When this doesn’t apply

Not every perimeter tour is a failure waiting to happen. Early in an engagement, or in a very large organization, the bus is genuinely the right first move — you need the wide loop before you know which narrow street to walk down. And some structures exist specifically because walking every street personally doesn’t scale: a CEO of a ten-thousand-person company isn’t failing by relying on layers of reporting. The problem isn’t the tour. It’s mistaking the tour for the whole trip — treating the loop as if it were sufficient, indefinitely, without ever also walking.

What to do this week

Pick one structure you rely on to “stay close” to your organization — a dashboard, a status meeting, a site visit rotation — and ask honestly: does this actually take me where the friction is, or just around it? Then pick one place that structure doesn’t reach, and go there directly this week. Not to replace the tour. Just to remember what the old town actually looks like.

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes