Solving vs Surfacing

Walt had been Vice President of Operations for nine months. He had come up fast, through routing and then analytics, and he was friendly with the technology platform in a way the people above him were not. The company ran its warehouse on modern software from a leading vendor. The dashboards were clean, and the trucks rolled on time.

What nobody upstairs knew was why. Every night, Walt wrote the override scripts himself. The platform was smart, but it didn’t know that one customer’s dock could not take a truck before six, or how the pick sequence broke during the seasonal push, or which alerts to trust. Walt knew. His scripts bridged the gap between the platform and the real world, and no one else could write them.

He had hired Samantha as director of operations in the spring to run the warehouse. Three weeks in, it was clear she was the right choice. And yet, the planned handover still hadn’t happened. Walt continued writing the override scripts, telling himself it was temporary, and knowing how essential his workarounds were to successful operations.

Then on Friday morning Samantha raised the question.

“What happens when you’re out?”

Walt started to answer, paused, and said, “Let’s pick that up next week.”

That weekend, he thought through the situation. The platform had gaps. The vendor knew some of them, and had suggested fixes. But the budget to close the gaps had died in committee twice, because the dashboards were clean and nothing ever broke. Nothing ever broke because Walt was up at five patching it. The problem wasn’t the platform, it was the system he had built around it — the scripts, the five a.m. saves, himself at the center. He designed the processes so that nothing ever surfaced, because he believed that a gap surfacing on his watch meant he had failed.

On Monday he walked Samantha through the scripts, handed over the access, and took himself off the morning calls. The gaps showed up within two weeks, the way he knew they would. He didn’t patch them. He documented the issues and the costs, and he carried his results upstairs as an objective report. When it happened again, he did the same.

The integration budget passed that quarter. In the meeting, the CEO credited him for surfacing the risk. He nodded.

The budget was never the real issue. It was the system he built that depended on him. Samantha helped him see it.

Every problem you quietly solve is a problem your organization never learns it has.

The Question

What problem in your organization stays invisible because you are so good at working around it?

“Today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions.” — Peter Senge