The Door Was Never Locked

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There’s a story about Houdini, the legendary escape artist.
He once accepted a challenge to break out of a jail cell. Child’s play, he thought.

He’d escaped tanks, straitjackets, even a locked milk can. This? A warm-up act.

But after hours of picking, twisting, sweating… nothing.
Defeated, he leaned against the door and it swung open.
It had never been locked.

The real trap wasn’t the cell.
It was the story in his head.

He assumed it had to be hard.
So he made it hard.

It’s easy to do that in life, especially at work.

We overengineer. We add steps.
We put friction in places it doesn’t belong and call it process.

We build elaborate onboarding paths, throw in beanbags and branded coffee mugs, and wonder why the best people still walk out the door.

But sometimes the thing we’re trying so hard to fix was never locked to begin with.

Sometimes, the escape route is already open.
And all it takes is someone noticing the handle.

One of our clients, DJ Oosthuizen Accountants, figured that out recently.
Turns out, the breakthrough wasn’t a mindset workshop.

It was finding the thing that made workflow… flow.
(Even GLs need an exit plan.)

Here’s how they opened the door → Testimonial

Until next time,
Christiaan

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