Your team’s most expensive project-Complaining

There’s one campaign in every company that never ends. It’s not for elections. It’s not for innovation. It’s not for culture.

It’s the Campaign to Complain.

You’ve seen it. You’ve probably led one. So have I. It starts with a whisper in the hallway, Then graduates to a full-blown speech in the team meeting:

“I just think it’s funny how…” “We talked about this six months ago…” “Why are we doing another survey when nothing changes?”

Mic drop. Applause from the unofficial Complain Committee. Cue: another hour gone.

The painfully true Formula for time lost to complaining

Let’s break it down with a simple calculation:

WCT = (N × M × C) / P

Where:

• WCT = Weekly Complaining Time (in hours)
• N = Number of people in the team
• M = Number of meetings per week
• C = Complaining Factor (usually between 0.2 to 0.8 depending on mood, weather, and proximity to performance reviews)
• P = Probability that the complaint is about someone not in the room (usually 1)

Let’s plug it in:

A team of 10 Has 3 meetings a week Average complaining factor of 0.5 Probability of gossip-style complaints = 1

WCT = (10 × 3 × 0.5) / 1 = 15 hours a week.

That’s almost two full working days. On complaining.

Now do the math across departments, months, and cost-cutting cycles. Suddenly, your real problem isn’t headcount—it’s headspace.

Why Complaining Feels Productive (But Often Isn’t)

Let’s be honest. Complaining can be good.

• It can reveal broken systems.
• It can spark creative ideas.
• It can bond people in shared frustration (hello, trauma bonding!).

But complaining turns toxic when:

• It rehashes the past that cannot be changed.
• It focuses on expectations that were never promised.
• It targets people who aren’t even in the room to defend themselves.

We move from creative complaints to campaigning complaints—constant loops that drain energy, morale, and even the appetite for change.

Chaos Method (Or How I Accidentally Became a Complaints Coach)

In the workshops I run, I use something I call the Chaos Method—it’s not about creating chaos, but embracing the existing mess and turning it into momentum.

We start with this assumption:

"People will complain. What if we built a structure that made the complaint useful?"

Imagine this:

• Instead of “Who’s to blame?”, we ask “What can be done differently next week?”
• Instead of “Why do they always do this?”, we ask “How do we influence what’s in our control?”
• Instead of long townhalls with passive faces, we create short feedback loops with real behavior change.

It’s chaos—but it’s channelized chaos.

In an era of cost-cutting, isn’t it time we saved the most expensive thing of all?

Our attention.

Stop campaigning. Start channeling. Because that complaint might just be a brilliant idea wearing the wrong outfit.