Inside Ben Cruachan, engineers carved a cathedral-sized chamber from solid rock. It was not for worship but for something equally powerful: storing electricity.

Cruachan pumps water from Loch Awe up to a reservoir 400 metres above when demand drops overnight. When the nation needs power, say, millions simultaneously boil kettles during an ad break, the water is released back down through turbines, generating 440 megawatts in under thirty seconds.

The core challenge of electricity is timing, not generation. We produce energy when it’s cheap or easy, and infrastructure like Cruachan stores it so we can have it at moments of highest demand.

The genius isn’t just the engineering, though hollowing out a mountain in 1965 qualifies as impressive. More importantly, it’s recognising that electricity’s real challenge isn’t how it’s generated, but when it’s available. For example, solar panels perform well at noon, yet offer little to no power at midnight.

Cruachan solved this by harnessing geography as a source of energy. There were no exotic materials, no complex chemistry, just water, gravity, and one spectacularly hollowed mountain.

Sometimes the most elegant solutions hide in plain sight. Or rather, inside one.

The problem hiding behind the problem

We expend considerable effort addressing capacity issues. More staff. Bigger budgets. Faster servers. Additional square footage.

Most organisational challenges are actually timing problems, not capacity issues. Though they often appear the opposite.

• You don’t need more content. You need it published when your audience is actually paying attention.
• You don’t need more leads. You need them when your sales team has the capacity to follow up properly.
• You don’t need more creative firepower. You need it to be available during the planning phases, not just at the last minute.

The distinction matters because the solutions are entirely different.

Capacity problems require more resources. Timing problems require different systems.

Marketing’s kettle moment

Consider the classic challenge of campaign delivery. You plan meticulously for months, then compress execution into a frantic week where everything happens simultaneously. Creative review, stakeholder approval, technical build, and launch all collide in a crescendo of preventable chaos.

The instinct is to add more people. More agencies. More project managers to coordinate the coordinators.

The real issue is temporal: work peaks happen because tasks are not distributed across available time. You generate when there’s no need, and then can’t deliver when you must.

Cruachan succeeds because it recognises that generation and consumption follow different schedules. Similarly, marketing improves when we recognise that strategy and execution operate on separate timelines.

Smart organisations build their own pumped storage: content calendars that bank finished work weeks ahead. Evergreen campaigns that deploy automatically. Systems that capture customer intent during quiet periods and convert it during busy ones.

Building your own hollow mountain

The practical question becomes: where are you treating timing problems as capacity problems?

Look for patterns where resources sit idle, then become immediately overwhelmed. Marketing teams with empty Januarys and catastrophic Novembers. Support queues that disappear overnight and explode each Monday morning. Budget that expires unused while projects queue for future funding.

What you likely need is better storage systems for managing timing, not simply bigger reservoirs of resources.

The answers often feel counterintuitive. Creating content when you don’t need it. Building systems during quiet periods. Banking goodwill before crises arrive. Hiring ahead of immediate demand.

That’s exactly why these methods work. They allow you to produce when it’s easy and deliver when it’s most valuable.

The right resource at the wrong time is functionally identical to having no resource at all. Midnight electricity from solar panels is worth precisely nothing.

The mountain power station doesn’t care about clean energy or renewable credentials (but that is a nice side-effect). It cares about solving the actual problem, which was never generation, but always timing.

The elegant constraint

What makes Cruachan brilliant is what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t attempt to generate more electricity. It doesn’t try to reduce consumption. It doesn’t innovate new forms of energy storage.

Cruachan accepts the limits it faces, such as the volume of water, the shape of the mountain, and the force of gravity. And works within them to solve the timing issue.

Most organisations do the opposite. They fight constraints by throwing resources at them, attempting to eliminate the problem through sheer capacity. More budget. More people. More of everything.

However, constraints aren’t always problems that require solutions. Sometimes, they’re simply realities that require different thinking.

You cannot make your customers need your product at more convenient times. You cannot make creativity arrive on demand. You cannot accelerate strategic thinking by adding more strategists.

But you can store what you create during abundance and deliver it during scarcity.

Water, gravity, and one spectacularly hollowed mountain

Sixty years after construction, Cruachan still works exactly as designed. No revolutionary updates required. No dramatic innovation necessary. Just the same water, same gravity, same mountain, solving the same problem it always solved.

There’s something reassuring about solutions that don’t require constant reinvention.

The engineers who carved that chamber understood that the best systems become invisible. Nobody thinks about Cruachan during the evening news. They just know the lights stay on when millions simultaneously decide to make tea.

That’s the goal: infrastructure so effective it disappears. Marketing systems that deliver results without constant intervention. Processes that work whether you’re watching or not.

Build your storage systems during the quiet periods. Test them before they’re needed. Trust them when demand arrives.

Because the problem was never how much power you can generate. It was always about having it precisely when you need it.

This article was written with the assistance of AI.