You’re sitting in an executive meeting looking at the quarterly numbers.
There's no way around it: you have too much capacity. Costs are too high. Revenue isn’t keeping pace. Something has to give.
The answer looks obvious: cut jobs.
Leadership approves the restructuring, announces a headcount target, and starts moving.
Then the union objects. Or the government intervenes. Or a court suspends the layoffs. Or it turns out the plants you planned to close are politically untouchable.
Oh...you can’t actually do it that way?
Well, crap! Now what?
Now the organization is scrambling to solve a problem that existed before the decision to cut heads was ever on the table.
That’s exactly what happened at Casas Bahia, a major Brazilian retailer.
The company started cutting jobs, but it appears they skipped over deciding how those cuts could lawfully and practically happen. The result was an injunction suspending the dismissals, restoring employee benefits, and forcing the company back into a process it should have settled before announcing the restructuring.
Look, layoffs may be the best option for an organization to remain viable. A company may genuinely need to reduce capacity. It happens.
But in this case (and I've seen this too often), leadership made the obvious, triage decision before identifying the First Domino: the load-bearing decision that would make the rest of the plan possible.
That's not just an execution problem.
It's a Conditions for Success problem: the organization failed to identify and secure the legal, stakeholder, and operational conditions required for the decision to stick.
More specifically, the First Domino sat squarely in the Systemic/Macro Domain of Influence... one of the 7 Domains that influence your Conditions For Success. And of the Domains you have the LEAST control over!
The organization was trying to change an outcome without first addressing the surrounding system - the rules, institutions, power relationships, dependencies, and constraints that determined whether the decision could actually take effect.
It means the organization made a decision it wasn’t ready to make or really able to execute.
The First Domino is the load-bearing decision that must be made before a larger strategic decision can be executed successfully.
It may not be the biggest or most visible decision, but it's the pre-requisite that makes that decision doable.
Finding the First Domino is a matter of decision sequencing: identifying which decision creates the conditions required for the other decisions to work.
When something goes wrong, leaders naturally look for the clearest available response:
These are the responses made recently by Volkswagen, Casas Bahia, and OpenAI, respectively. And they may be the right decisions...eventually.
But identifying what eventually needs to happen is not the same as identifying what must happen first.
Every consequential decision rests on other decisions, usually tied to your Conditions For Success.
And until that First Domino falls, the obvious decision won't stick.
Volkswagen’s supervisory board recently approved what Reuters described as the largest restructuring in the automaker’s history.
On the surface, the decision looks clear: Volkswagen must become a smaller, less complicated, more competitive company.
But the future of four German plants remains uncertain. Alternative uses are still being evaluated.
That matters because “reduce capacity” is not yet an executable decision.
Which capacity? Where? On what timeline? With whose agreement?
Volkswagen operates within the German system where labor reps have formal power in corporate governance. The state of Lower Saxony is also a major shareholder. These details are part of the macro and systemic Conditions For Success that any decision must consider. Volkswagen can't just make an end run around the government to get what it wants.
Volkswagen may know where it wants to end up. But as Reuters noted in its analysis of the agreement, the future of those plants is still unclear and the harder negotiations are still ahead.
The First Domino isn’t “approve the transformation.”
It is deciding what capacity Volkswagen is genuinely willing and able to remove and reaching the stakeholder agreements required to remove it.
Until then, the company has chosen a destination. It hasn’t completed the decision that gets it there.
Brazilian retailer Casas Bahia offers an even clearer example.
As part of its restructuring, Casas Bahia dismissed about 1,900 employees. But they didn't do the prior union negotiation (that was required by a court ruling) before making those cuts.
Brazil’s labor courts intervened. The union’s position didn't say that the retailer couldn't restructure. It challenged how the company attempted to do it.
That “how” is important.
Leaders are often told to stay focused on strategy and not implementation (because that's what teams are for!). But before implementation can happen, you first need to know whether a decision is legal, technically possible, adequately funded, politically viable, or operationally executable. You can't just assume it's all systems go, or you might end up in court!
The "how" is the load-bearing decision, not an implementation issue.
Casas Bahia’s obvious decision was to reduce headcount.
The First Domino was determining the process through which those reductions could lawfully and practically happen (the "how").
The retailer tried to move quickly. Instead, the sequence created litigation, disrupted benefits, and more uncertainty for the very people already carrying the consequences.
That isn’t speed.
It's movement that's out of order.
The same pattern can appear when the governing constraint isn’t a labor agreement or a powerful shareholder.
Sometimes the missing First Domino is an evidence threshold.
During internal cybersecurity evaluations, OpenAI agents escaped their intended constraints, gained internet access, and compromised systems belonging to OpenAI and Hugging Face.
Reuters later reported a separate incident involving a German-language wiki that the agents hijacked that OpenAI knew about weeks before publicly acknowledging it.
OpenAI made decisions about containment, remediation, testing, and internal review, but another question remained:
At what point are people outside the organization owed the truth?
An organization shouldn't wait for an incident and then improvise their disclosure standard while simultaneously managing all the (legal, reputational, technical, and competitive) consequences of applying it.
By then, every disclosure decision is tangled up with self-protection... which leaves organizational outsiders leery about trusting what the company chose to disclose in the first place.
The First Domino is establishing the evidence threshold in advance:
A kill switch may stop a problem, but it can't fix a disclosure standard that never existed.
Volkswagen's capacity strategy needs a completed capacity-allocation decision.
Casas Bahia's restructuring needs to clear the stakeholder process.
OpenAI's incident-response systems need a clear disclosure threshold.
These organizations share the same underlying mistake:
They acted on the obvious decision before identifying the First Domino that would make that decision stick.
This is why decisions that seem perfect in the meeting fall apart during execution.
Sequence matters.
Before your organization commits to the obvious move, ask the question that almost seems too obvious to ask:
Can we actually make this decision?
Can the decision survive contact with the reality in which it must operate?
Understand your Conditions for Success before you commit:
That last question is where many leadership teams get uncomfortable, but, if Casas Bahia is any indicator, discomfort is often cheaper than reversal.
The One Move That Matters® is not necessarily the biggest decision, the boldest decision, or the one everyone is impatient to announce.
It's the move that creates the conditions for everything that follows.
Sometimes that's the obvious triage decision.
Far more often, though, the First Domino is an authority decision. A stakeholder decision. A capacity decision. An evidence-standard decision. A decision about what the organization is genuinely willing to sacrifice.
Until that load-bearing decision is made, everything built on top of it remains fragile.
So before asking, “What do we need to do?” find out what needs to be decided first so you can actually do it.
If your organization is facing a decision that looks obvious but keeps getting stuck in execution, let's talk. I can help you identify the First Domino, clarify the real constraints, and determine the One Move That Matters®.