Hey, welcome to the briefing. What I'm going to cover with you today is this. Navigate obstacles rapidly in retail. The store closed. The customer did not disappear with it. Neither did the workforce. Neither did the demand. The building stopped being available. The objective did not. That sounds simple when you say it out loud. Of course the store is not the customer. Of course the building is not the whole business. Of course one location is not the objective. Right? Well, pressure has a way of making obvious distinctions disappear. We spend years building operating paths that work. We refine them, we staff them, we measure them. Customers learn them, employees learn them, managers learn them. Eventually the path becomes so normal that we stop seeing it as one route to the objective. We start treating the route like it is the objective. The store becomes the objective. The counter becomes the objective. The fulfillment process becomes the objective. The person who always handles the issue becomes the objective. The system becomes the objective. Then one of those things closes, fails, loses capacity, or becomes unavailable, and the organization starts acting like everything behind it has to stop too. It does not always have to. Sometimes the obstacle can stay exactly where it is while the objective moves around it. At the end of July to 2026, HEB closed its Spicewood Springs grocery store in Northwest Austin. Its final day of operation was July 31st. Public reporting said the store was approaching the end of its lease. HEB decided not to renew it, and the company described the location as one of its smaller, older stores. By the August 8th research cutoff for this briefing, there was no future tense left in that statement. The store was closed. The normal neighborhood shopping path through that location was gone. Customers who had built routines around that store could not keep following the same route. Employees who worked there could not simply report to the same building and continue operating exactly as they had before. That is a real obstacle. But here is what makes the situation useful. HEB did not publicly treat continued service as dependent on putting those customers back into that building. The company directed customers toward other nearby HEB locations. Public reporting identified five other HEB stores within roughly five miles of the former Spicewood Spring store. HEB also offered affected customers free curbside pickup and free delivery during August, and employees were offered positions elsewhere in the HEB network. Those are the facts we can work with. There are also facts we do not have. We do not know how much customer volume moved into each nearby location. We do not know whether one receiving store experienced more pressure than another. We do not know how much curbside or delivery volume changed. We do not know how many customers moved to competitors. We do not know the internal staffing calculations, capacity discussions, executive conversations, or operating thresholds behind those decisions. And uh I want to be precise about that because this is where people can ruin a useful real world example. They start filling in the parts they do not know because the imaginary version makes the story cleaner. Do not do that. We do not need to. The lesson is already sitting in what is publicly known. The store was the path. It was never the objective. That is the point. Retail leaders build repeatable paths because repeatability is useful. You need it. Customers enter through a certain place, returns move through a certain counter. Curbside orders move through a certain staging process, inventory moves through receiving, deliveries follow a certain route, labor is allocated against expected traffic, escalations move through known people, everybody learns where things go. That is not bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy. That is operating discipline. The problem begins when you get so attached to the path that you stop distinguishing it from the result it was built to create. You do not notice that while things are working, why would you? The customer walks in, the transaction happens, the inventory moves, the associate does the work, the shift closes, then something blocks the route. A store closes, a service counter cannot operate, a dock becomes unavailable, a vendor cannot deliver through the normal route, a digital channel loses capacity, a key employee becomes unavailable, a fulfillment point goes down, and now leadership has a decision. The first instinct is usually restoration. Get it back, open the counter, restore the system, replace the person, fix the door, get the store running, return to normal. I understand that instinct. The old path worked. Your people know it. Your customers know it, the labor model knows it. The surrounding process was built around it. Restoring the familiar route feels like restoring control. Sometimes that is exactly right. Sometimes the path itself has to be restored because there is no responsible alternative. But not every obstacle has to be solved where it sits before the objective can continue. That is where path captivity starts. Think about what disappears when a familiar store closes. Customers lose the parking lot, entrance, aisles, and service desk, they know. Employees lose the building, routines, and physical workflow they know. That disruption is real, but leadership still has to separate what actually stopped from everything that merely depended on it. The building stopped serving customers. The larger network did not. Customers still needed groceries. Other stores, curbside, delivery, employee capability, and customer demand still existed. That difference creates choices. Now let me make one thing more precise. I am not saying HEB used the direct action system. They did not publicly describe their decision using our language, and I'm not going to assign a framework to people who never said they used it. What I am saying is that the visible response gives us a clean example of the operating principle behind obstacle redirection. The obstacle remained. The objective had other paths. A lot of leaders never get to that question, because they are still staring at the thing that stopped. The store is closed, the dock is blocked, the system is unavailable, the person is gone, the route is broken. All true. But those statements describe the obstacle. They do not automatically describe the condition of the entire objective. So the better question is not immediately, how do I restore this exact path? The better question is what still has to happen, and does it actually have to happen through this path? If the answer is yes, fine. You may need direct correction, you may have to repair the path, you may have to intervene where the obstacle sits. But if the answer is no, then you have another responsibility as the leader. You need to determine whether the objective can move through another controlled route without creating a larger problem somewhere else. Controlled. That word matters. Because movement by itself means almost nothing. Apparently motion had applied for management. I can move the woo, no, I can reroute the work. I can reroute customers, shift orders, change a service point, redirect communication or handwork to another team. None of that automatically means I protected the objective. If I tell customers to figure out another store, I transferred the problem to the customer. If I move employees without understanding workload, role fit, schedules, or actual need, I relocated the problem. If I push demand into curbside without knowing capacity, I may remove one obstacle and create another inside fulfillment. That is displacement, not controlled redirection. And I think this is where people get fooled because the work starts moving again. Customers are buying, employees have somewhere to report, orders are moving, leadership says, okay, we are good. Are you? Who carries the pressure now? Demand does not disappear because you redirect it, workload does not disappear, responsibility does not disappear, pressure moves. If you have the authority to redirect work, you also have the responsibility to understand what the receiving team is being asked to carry. If I send you more work with no warning, no priority guidance, no ownership clarity, and no support, then criticize you when your normal operation slips. That is not accountability. That is leadership creating the condition and pushing the consequence downward. Obstacle redirection is not permission to do that. It is controlled redirection. Let's put a leader inside this. Imagine you are a district operations leader responsible for several grocery stores inside one market. One location becomes unavailable. Maybe it is a lease decision like the HEB case. Maybe a fire or structural problem takes the building out of service. The exact cause can vary. You still have customers, employees, demand, a brand promise, and surrounding stores you are responsible for protecting. Your first instinct is the unavailable location. How quickly can we get it back? Can we reopen part of it? Can we restore normal operation? Those are responsible questions. But then you learn restoration is not available on the timeline the customer objective needs. Now what? This is where leaders get trapped. They keep talking about the block point because the block point is visible. Meanwhile, customers begin building their own continuity plan. One drives to another store. Another uses delivery. Another calls customer service. Another shows up at a nearby location asking questions that team was never prepared to answer. Employees do the same thing. One calls a manager because they do not know where to report. Another assumes there are no hours. Another location receives transferred employees without a clear role plan. Managers start solving individual problems because nobody created one shared route. Now stop there. The original obstacle was one closed location. The organization just created multiple uncontrolled paths around it. And this is where the operating plan starts looking exactly as stupid as it is. Three stores, two fulfillment channels, six managers, and one customer service inbox are all declaring themselves the official detour while nobody can tell the customer who actually owns the route. Funny picture. Real consequence. The deeper failure is not the closure. It is fragmented movement. And the first response was understandable. People were trying to keep things going. Nobody has to be incompetent for this to happen. Sometimes capable people create a weak operating condition by taking locally reasonable actions without one shared picture. The leader has to redefine the objective. The objective is not get the old store back immediately. The objective is continue serving customers through controlled paths while protecting the receiving operation and keeping the unresolved issue owned. Now the choices look different. A nearby store may absorb demand. Curbside may preserve convenience. Delivery may provide another path. Employees may be reassigned based on actual positions and actual need. Communication can tell customers what changed instead of making them discover it by trial and error. Now you are not staring at the building, you are managing the customer path, but do not overcorrect. An alternate route can fail under load. A nearby store may already be near its labor limit. Curbside may have capacity in the morning and be overloaded later. Delivery may protect convenience while increasing fulfillment pressure. Another route can become another obstacle. The workaround just opened its own franchise. That is why an available path and a controlled path are not the same thing. An available route exists. A controlled route carries the objective without creating unacceptable damage around it. That is the harder standard. I have made versions of this mistake. You build a route that works, you understand it, you trust it, you know the people and the sequence. Then conditions change. And your first instinct is to preserve the thing you understand because the alternative feels less controlled. I did not always separate familiarity from necessity as cleanly as I should have. The work teaches you that. What has always worked and what must continue are not automatically the same thing. The store was the path. It was never the objective. Once you understand that, you see the same distinction elsewhere. A customer service counter may support resolution. A warehouse may support fulfillment. An approval chain may support controlled release. A software platform may support visibility or transaction control. The mechanism matters, but the leader has to know what outcome that mechanism exists to protect. And no, that does not mean people are interchangeable. Let me make that more accurate before somebody hears something I'm not saying. A specific person may carry unique authority, expertise, trust, institutional knowledge, or technical capability that cannot simply be reassigned. In that case, the person may genuinely be critical to the objective, and you may need a different deepened strategy. What I am saying is do not assume dependency before you inspect it. There is a difference between this person is the only qualified person and this person has always done it. There is a difference between this store is the only practical path and this is the store we have always used. Not the same statement. Obstacle redirection belongs after you understand enough about the condition to know what you are moving around. You need to know the obstacle is real. It is interfering with the objective, the objective still matters. Direct correction is not the best immediate move, and another responsible path may exist. Then stay honest about what that alternate path does not solve. A closed store can stop operating while customers continue to be served. That does not mean the closure has no consequence. Employees can move, that does not make the transition effortless. Delivery can carry demand, that does not give delivery infinite capacity. Redirection does not erase labor, capacity, ownership, or the original obstacle. Ah, are we good or did we just make the failure less visible? That is the question. Look at the receiving side. If another store takes the customers, what happens to checkout pressure, replenishment, curbside staging, labor, and service recovery? I am not saying those things happened in the HEB case. We do not know that. I am saying those are the second order effects a leader has to inspect in any retail redirection. That is why I like HEB as the example. We do not have to make the company the villain or invent a failure. The public response shows an organization that did not make continued service dependent on restoring an unavailable physical location. Customers had other stores, curbside and delivery. Employees had opportunities elsewhere in the network. The path was gone, so other paths carried the objective. Sometimes the stronger lesson is not watching somebody fail. It is understanding why a disciplined operating decision keeps one obstacle from controlling more of the operation than it should. Take that principle back into retail. A service counter goes unavailable. What customer objective did it support? And can that objective move through another approved route? A receiving door becomes unavailable. Does inbound movement stop? Or can sequence and door assignment change? A curbside staging area becomes unusable. Can pickup move without confusing customers or wrecking the floor? Do not assume the answer is yes. The point is to ask before the block path defines the whole objective. This is what good leaders do under pressure. They protect the objective without becoming emotionally loyal to the mechanism. Now bring the direct action structure into this. CSA improves the read before you start moving anything. It helps you understand what is actually unavailable, what is still functioning, what changed, who is affected, and what information you can trust. The statement the store is closed is accurate. It is not a full assessment. The store is closed, other stores exist, curbside exists, delivery exists, the workforce still has capability, customers still have demand. Those additional facts change the problem. That cleaner CSA read feeds deepen. Deepen helps you determine what kind of response the obstacle requires. If the issue is real but not blocking the objective, maybe it can be identified and postponed. If the active problem can be contained where it is while the objective continues, tactical resolution may fit. If the problem has to be acted on directly where it sits, critical intervention may fit. Obstacle redirection is different. Obstacle redirection says the obstacle is actively interfering. Direct correction is not the best immediate move. But the objective may continue if the obstacle's effect is moved out of the current path. You change the route. You do not pretend the obstacle disappeared. You do not call it solved. And notice what I am not doing here. I am not walking you through offset. I am not giving you the full redirection process, alternate path structure, return point design, or decision tree. That deeper work belongs in the training. What I want you to recognize here is the condition. The obstacle is real. It is in the path. The objective still matters. Direct correction is not the best immediate move. Another path may exist. That is when obstacle redirection should enter your thinking. Then Pro helps you inspect what that redirection can damage. What happens to the customer, the employee, the receiving store, workload, service consistency? What happens if you move pressure faster than the receiving operation can absorb it? TMC matters because moved work needs clean direction. What changed? Who owns the new path? Who needs to know? What does the receiving team need? What does the customer need to understand? A weak redirection combined with poor communication becomes chaos with a different address. The problem got transferred and somehow earned a store number. ALC matters later because you need to learn from what actually happened. What worked? Where did friction appear? Which alternate channel carried the work well? Where did pressure move unexpectedly? What should be prepared differently next time? The direct action system supports the decision. Obstacle redirection remains the tool. Now bring this into your own operation. Think about one objective you are responsible for right now: a customer experience, a delivery, an order, a shift objective, a service promise, a staffing requirement, a sales target. Now look at the normal path your team uses to produce that outcome. One store, one person, one system, one counter, one process, one vendor, one approval chain. Ask yourself something uncomfortable. If that path disappeared tomorrow, would the objective actually stop? Or would your team feel like it stopped because nobody separated the objective from the route? Do not immediately build the workaround. Do not start moving people because you heard the word redirection. First ask what still has to happen. State the old but no, state the objective without naming the current route. If you say we need the service counter open, you name the path. What does the counter accomplish? If you say we need Jessica back, you named a person. What outcome does Jessica normally produce? If you say we need the system restored, you name the system. What business objective does the system carry? Then ask what actually stopped. The building, the transaction, the access point, the communication path, the inventory movement. The answer may be much narrower than the emotional response around it. Then ask what still works. Other locations, other channels, other authorized people, other service points, other fulfillment methods. That does not mean use them. It means inspect them. And then ask the question that separates disciplined redirection from dumping the problem on somebody else. What stays unresolved if the objective moves? The closed building is still closed, the equipment is still down, the vendor problem still exists, the system issue still exists. Who owns that? When does it come back into the decision? What would tell you the alternate route is starting to fail. If nobody can answer those questions, be careful. You may not have redirected the obstacle, you may have buried it. Buried workarounds have a way of becoming permanent. A team builds a temporary path on Monday. By Friday, everybody is using it. A month later nobody remembers why it started. The original problem still exists, and the alternate path has no real control. Leadership has accidentally built a second operating system. By that point, the temporary workaround has a shared inbox, three unofficial rules, two people training everyone on how not to use it, and apparently tenure. Take away the cartoon, and the consequence remains. That is not disciplined redirection. That is drift. And now instead of one obstacle, you have the original obstacle. A plus a were a workaround. Everybody's afraid to remove because they depend on it. You created complexity and called it continuity. Retail makes this visible because customers experience the path in real time. If the store is closed, pickup changes, or another store becomes the receiving location, they know it. The customer should not be the first person who discovers your new operating model. The receiving store should not discover the strategy because traffic suddenly showed up. If the customer has to design the continuity plan, you did not redirect the obstacle. You handed the obstacle to the customer. And if the receiving team has to improvise after the work arrives, you move the burden instead of controlling it. I want you to hear the fairness component in that. People need the information, authority, support, resources, and preparation to carry the work you assign them. If leadership redirects work into another team, leadership has a responsibility to make sure the team understands what it is being asked to carry. Support the people. Clarify the standard, protect the objective, inspect the pressure, then hold people accountable for what was actually within their control. The HEB closure gives us a useful picture because the alternate paths are visible. Nearby physical stores, curbside delivery, and other employment opportunities inside the network. Again, we cannot claim outcomes the public record does not establish. We do not know whether every customer found the transition easy or whether nearby stores experienced additional strain. We do not have to pretend we know. What we know is enough. The old physical path ended. Continued customer service did not depend on restoring that physical path. Now start listening for the same pattern in your environment. Listen when somebody describes the objective as a location. We have to reopen this area. Okay? Maybe. What outcome does the area support? Listen when somebody describes the objective as a person. We cannot do this without him. Maybe that is true. What authority, capability, relationship, or technical competence makes it true? Listen when somebody describes the objective as a system. We cannot move until the system is back. Maybe. What transaction or decision does that system support? Listen for customers designing alternate routes themselves. Listen for work arriving at receiving teams without warning. Listen for temporary processes nobody owns. Listen when the strongest argument for restoring a path is this is how we have always done it. That is a warning. Familiarity is evidence that a route worked. It is not proof that the route remains necessary. Here is what right looks like to me at the recognition level. When a normal path disappears, do not immediately ask how to get the path back. First ask what the objective actually is. Ask what truly stopped. Ask what still works. Ask whether the objective genuinely requires the original route. Then ask what problem remains if you move the objective somewhere else. That is not the full obstacle redirection process. It is enough to keep you from handing control of the objective to the obstacle before you have inspected the situation. The route is allowed to change. The objective is what you are responsible for protecting. Obstacle redirection becomes relevant when the obstacle is real, the objective still has to move. Direct correction is not the best immediate move, and another controlled path can carry the work without pretending the obstacle has been solved. The obstacle can stay exactly where it is and still lose control of the objective. That is the distinction. Protect the old path or protect the objective. Know which one you are actually responsible for. When you are ready to go deeper with this tool, go to www.direct action system.io slash course dash directory. Open the course directory, find the course tied to obstacle redirection and deepen. And start there. That is where the deeper application belongs. Thanks for listening to the briefing.