Are We Built for the Load We're Under?

This current series explains the 6 questions to ask when you have problems that have already been “fixed” once… or twice… and are somehow back again.

We’ll spend our time looking at what your organizational pressure is revealing, where things are straining, and what actually has to change so the fix sticks.

The goal isn’t more activity. It’s fewer repeats.

Thanks for being with us for the fourth question. The links to the first three are at the bottom.

The most tempting question to ask when an organization starts coming apart is "WTF?" Cathartic. Doesn't lead anywhere useful. The better question is harder, and most people skip it: is the organization actually built for what it's being asked to do right now?

The reason we skip it is that we've been trained to check organizations against measurable goals. Are we hitting our numbers? Are projects on track? Are customers happy? (Sure. Those matter.) They're questions about outputs, and outputs can look fine while the thing producing them is buckling underneath.

The people doing the work carry a lot of that. They work longer. Cut corners they'd normally never cut. Push things off. They keep the outputs looking okay longer than the situation warrants. The system looks like it's working because the people inside it are propping it up. Then at some point, usually at the worst possible time, it stops working all at once.

What sets how long a system can take that kind of pressure, and what happens when it can't anymore, is mostly about load.

Load, the way I'm using it, is the total pressure on the organization at any given time. Not just workload. It’s... a lot. It includes how much work is moving through, how fast it has to move, how complex the decisions are, how much coordination it takes, how much uncertainty people are managing, and how many constraints they're working inside. A team handling twice as many projects as last year is under higher load. So is a team with the same number of projects but half the runway, or with dependencies that keep shifting, or with leadership that keeps changing priorities. The work looks similar from outside. The weight of it isn't.

The reason load matters is that most organizational structures are built for a specific range of it. They were set up, on purpose or by accident, to handle a certain amount of work at a certain pace with a certain level of complexity. When the load stays inside that range, things work. Decisions get made. Work moves. Teams coordinate without too much friction. Probably not perfectly, but well enough. The workarounds are manageable. The bottlenecks are tolerable. The things the system is hiding (we talked about those last issue) stay hidden because there's enough slack to absorb the cost.

When load goes up, the structure gets tested in ways it wasn't built for. The first things to crack are almost always the places already running on workarounds instead of real fixes. The bottleneck that was annoying at normal volume becomes a crisis at higher volume. The approval process that added a week to each project now compounds, leading to some being pushed out by months. The two teams with a tense but manageable relationship are now in open conflict because the pressure has used up whatever slack let them avoid each other. The problems that were background noise become the loudest thing in the room.

This is why the same organization can feel completely different from one year to the next without anything obvious having changed. People are mostly the same. Strategy is mostly the same. The load is different, and the structure that handled the old load is buckling under the new one. Leaders often read this as a performance problem, or a culture problem, or a leadership problem. Sometimes it is. The more honest read, often, is that it's a load problem. The organization is being asked to carry more (or something different) than it was built to carry, and it's showing.

Take a company that spent years as a specialist. Knew its market. Knew its customer. Had a process that worked because the work was consistent and predictable. Then growth showed up. With it came new markets, new customer types, new products, and new kinds of decisions the old process wasn't built to handle. The people who were excellent at the original work are now being asked to do something different in kind, and the systems they're using are still set up for the company that was. Work slows down because the process has more variety moving through it than it was built to sort. Decisions that used to be straightforward now need judgment calls the existing rules don't cover. Coordination that used to be simple now needs people who don't share context, priorities, or sometimes even vocabulary.

That company doesn't have a performance problem. The structure hasn't kept up with what the business is asking of it.

This difference matters because of what it does to your response. Diagnose a load problem as a performance problem and you reach for performance answers: more accountability, clearer goals, better tracking, harder conversations with people who aren't delivering. Some of that might be warranted. None of it changes the underlying situation, because the underlying situation is about how the thing is built. You're asking the floor to hold more weight than it was made for, and the response is to tell the floor to try harder. But the floor can't try harder. It needs to be reinforced.

The right question? Whether the load your organization is carrying right now is the same load it was carrying when the current structure got set up. Not when the company was founded. When the current way of working took shape. How has the volume changed? How has the complexity changed? How much more coordination does it take than it used to? How much faster do decisions have to be made? If the answers say load has shifted or gone up a lot while the structure has stayed mostly the same, that isn't a small observation. That's the context for most of what's been frustrating you.

Load doesn't damage everything equally. It finds the weak points first. And it doesn't show up the same way in every team. The difference between what’s cracking and what isn't is where the diagnosis begins.

Stokefire works with CHROs, COOs, CEOs, and Executive Directors on the problems underneath the problems. To learn more about our process, subscribe to The Load.

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