Single Player Mode is when everything routes through you. You make the final call, you check-in constantly, you touch everything at least once.
It’s not necessarily ego. It is insecurity posing as quality control. You believe your edge (judgement, taste, perspective, whatever) is what keeps things from breaking. So you design the work around you. Everything flows in and out through you. Which makes you the bottleneck. The same pattern can show up anywhere:
The freelancer who won’t automate because “clients expect me personally.”
The manager marking up every deliverable “to get it perfect.”
The executive approving every slide “to get the tone right.”
In every case, insecurity hard-codes itself into the workflow. And that’s how companies grind to a halt, bound up in red tape and bottlenecks.
So what do you do?
If you want more confidence, give your people more context. As long as judgment rests in one person, it can't scale.
Yes, it's easier to tweak this deck than write down what makes a great deck. But when you add up all the decks you're reviewing... that math isn't mathing anymore.
Businesses live or die by what's written down, not by what's in one person's head. When they have the necessary information people can move faster, systems self-correct, fires get handled at the lowest level possible.
That’s why leaving Single Player Mode feels like cheating. All of a sudden, you're free.
