In Epiphany 7: The Importance of Fundamentals and Root Causes, I wrote that almost every problem—whether technical, organizational, or strategic—can be traced back to a neglected fundamental or an untreated root cause. We don’t fail because we lack ideas or ambition; we fail because we abandon the basics that make progress repeatable.
That idea came roaring back to life for me in an unexpected place: a pickleball court.
The Lesson on the Court
Last night, my wife and I attended an introductory pickleball class at the Pickleball Place at the suggestion of my good friend Bill Scully. Within ten minutes, the instructor had mentioned fundamentals at least a dozen times. Proper Grip. Stance. Wrist pivot. Swing path. Control. Placement. Over and over, he reinforced that if we could master those, we could excel at the game.
We spent the next 15 minutes working on “dinking,” where you keep the ball in the blue area (the kitchen) directly behind the net. Initially frustrating because we knew nothing about anything, this part of the session taught us more than we had known. This forced us to learn how to paddle effectively. How to hold it, swing it, and most importantly, follow through. Arriving before our session and watching people play, I did not see a single person doing this; it seemed more like tennis, slamming the ball over the net.
I kept thinking that this is like any other sport, where you need to train your body to function in a specific way. Baseball players throw a thousand pitches, or batters with 1000 swings. As my clay pigeon shooting coach told me, you need to mount the shotgun 100 times and practice your follow-through of the target before taking your first shot. It is the same mechanics.
Then he had us pause and watch a group playing on the next court. They were clearly having fun—lots of energy, laughter, and solid rallies. But none of the fundamentals he just showed us were there. Their swings were wild, their footwork was inconsistent, and their shots were reactive, slamming the ball across the net.
He smiled and said, “They’ll never get past a 3.0.”
I don’t even know what that means yet, but I knew exactly what he meant. You can play forever at that level, have a great time doing it, and never get better—because enjoyment alone doesn’t create progress. Discipline does.
One of the other students mentioned that they were pretty aggressive players, more so than she was hoping for. He told her the fastest way to shut them down is to focus on what I just taught you. By focusing on “dinks,” you can disrupt the opponent’s rhythm and set up your own offensive plays by controlling the pace of the rally. By essentially staying calm, you can create an “unattackable shot” that forces a mistake. The coach went on to say that teaching this foundational skill and getting students to master it creates a strong foundation for advanced strategies and higher-level play.
The Illusion of Mastery Without Fundamentals
That moment hit me because I see it every day in business. Teams and leaders who are playing hard but not playing right. They’ve grown comfortable in motion—meeting, projects, reports, and campaigns—but have quietly disconnected from the fundamentals that drive improvement.
The pickleball players on that other court weren’t beginners. They were competent. They knew enough to sustain a rally, maybe even win some games. But their foundation was unstable, which meant they would plateau. They’d hit their “3.0 ceiling.”
In business, this looks like the company that:
- Jumps from one initiative to another without addressing the root problem.
- Optimizes outputs (more content, more campaigns, more dashboards) without verifying outcomes.
- Fixes symptoms rather than systems.
- Mistakes activity for alignment.
They’re doing the corporate equivalent of “playing a lot of games,” but they’ll never break through to mastery because they’ve stopped refining their form.
Why Fundamentals Feel Boring (and Why They’re Not)
The irony is that fundamentals are rarely complex, and they are exciting.
Checking your grip, refining your swing, revisiting your process flow, or aligning a measurement framework all feel like “slow” work in a fast-moving world.
So teams skip them.
Leaders delegate them.
Organizations assume they’re already covered.
But mastery never comes from novelty. It comes from repetition and refinement. The best athletes, musicians, pilots, and engineers all share one truth: they never “graduate” from fundamentals. They revisit them constantly.
In pickleball, that means thousands of controlled dinks and serves.
In business, that means consistent process reviews, team retrospectives, and root-cause audits.
It’s not glamorous work—but it’s the only work that scales.
The 3.0 Plateau: Motion Without Progress
When the instructor said, “They’ll never get past a 3.0,” he wasn’t being judgmental—he was being accurate.
A 3.0 player can hold their own, but they can’t adapt. They play reactively, not strategically. They’ve built muscle memory around comfort, not improvement.
In organizations, I’ve encountered many “3.0 companies.”
They’re good enough to stay in the game, but not disciplined enough to dominate it.
They:
- Rely on experience over process.
- Confuse longevity with learning.
- Prioritize pace over precision.
- Build local optimizations that don’t scale globally.
They can win a few matches—launch a good campaign, ship a new site, hit a quarterly KPI—but they can’t sustain success because their foundation is inconsistent.
Like a 3.0 player, they don’t need more effort; they need better form.
Systems Thinking: Fundamentals at Scale
A few weeks ago, someone introduced me as a systems-thinking root-cause fundamentalist.
It made me laugh—but it also felt true.
Because systems thinking is the discipline of fundamentals, just at scale. It’s about understanding how the grip, stance, and swing of different functions interact—how a small misalignment in one motion ripples across the entire game.
When you zoom out to see your organization as a system, fundamentals suddenly reappear everywhere:
- In the grip: do you truly understand the root cause before taking action?
- In the stance: are your systems aligned so each team’s motion reinforces the others?
- In the swing: are you executing with control, precision, and feedback, not just effort?
When those fundamentals erode, the entire system starts compensating for friction rather than generating force.
That’s why “root cause” isn’t just an analytical exercise—it’s an act of discipline. It’s how you keep your form under pressure.
Fundamentals Are Freedom
In the end, “Fundamentals are Freedom,” to which you can build advanced techniques. That is a play off of Jocko Willink’s Discipline Equals Freedom concept – Toward the end of class, the instructor reminded us that:
“Once you master the fundamentals, you stop thinking about them—and that’s when the game gets fun.”
That’s as true in leadership as it is in sport.
Fundamentals aren’t restrictions. They’re liberation.
They give you structure, so you can improvise.
They give you control, so you can innovate.
They give you confidence, so you can take bigger risks.
The reason so many teams feel trapped by complexity is that they’ve lost sight of the basics. They’ve built workarounds on top of workarounds. Every new initiative compensates for an unaddressed root cause, until the system becomes a web of patches instead of a cohesive design.
By returning to fundamentals—by re-teaching grip, stance, and swing—you reduce complexity and increase flow.
You create the freedom to operate with speed and accuracy.
Practicing Fundamentals in Leadership
The best leaders I’ve worked with are those who never tire of the basics.
They ask the simple questions others overlook:
- What are we really trying to achieve?
- How will we know it worked?
- What’s the root cause of this pattern?
- Is this decision aligned with the larger system?
They don’t chase every new framework or buzzword—they refine the fundamentals that make the system resilient.
That’s not nostalgia; it’s systems hygiene.
And when the fundamentals are healthy, so is the organization.
Culture strengthens. Execution accelerates. Results stabilize.
How to Audit Your Fundamentals
If you want to test whether your team or company has drifted from its fundamentals, ask yourself three questions:
- Can everyone explain the “why” behind what they’re doing?
If not, intent has been replaced by inertia. - Are we solving the same problems repeatedly?
If yes, you’re fixing symptoms instead of root causes. - Do our wins compound, or reset every quarter?
If they reset, your fundamentals aren’t yet repeatable.
Every sustainable improvement begins with awareness of form.
Every system transformation begins by mastering the basics—again.
Closing Reflection: The Discipline of Repetition
There’s a reason the Marines drill the same movements until they become instinctive. There’s a reason elite athletes practice form under pressure. There’s a reason I still teach teams how to trace root causes and map systems even after decades of doing it.
Because mastery isn’t about doing new things—it’s about doing the right things consistently well.
So whether it’s a racket, a strategy, or a system—
check your grip, fix your stance, refine your swing.
That’s how you break through the 3.0 plateau.
That’s how you move from playing the game to mastering it.
And that’s how you transform fundamentals from something you do into something you are.
