The Load

You can’t learn what’s safe in an organization by reading the handbook. You learn it by watching what happens to the last person who shared a hard truth, or admitted a mistake. That outcome outweighs the entire universe of inspirational posters about open communication and trust.

I’m beginning to think that we shouldn’t worry so much about whether people like us. In business and life it seems like it’s healthier to focus on whether they have enough evidence that they’re willing to rely on us (for things we’re capable of) when that reliance could cost them something.

Building a team around one star is brittle and failure-prone by design, not by bad luck. A star is temporary. Stars transfer, retire, burn out, or leave for an avocado farm, so the club that rests its results on them is running on a clock it can’t see. The problem shows up while the star is still there. Every team skill the star replaces just rots on the vine. By the time the star is gone, the team has spent months destroying the crop it will depend on.

Whose work grew this year while your praise stood still? Find someone you talked up a year ago and haven't really engaged since. Look at what they're actually doing now. Then do what you can to share what they've become, specifically and in public if you can. The test of recognition is simple... whether the picture you have of someone has kept up with where they are now. Done honestly, it closes the gap between what you say you value and what your attention actually tracks.

Early in the first season of Ted Lasso, the show stages a training session that anyone who's ever been new at a job will recognize from the inside. In this instance, a young defender keeps getting beaten by the team's star, who celebrates each win by mocking him in front of the squad. Watch the kid through the whole drill and you can see the real problem: every mistake costs him a few seconds of replaying it in his head, and those few seconds are exactly the window the next m

Trust compounds in a fictional locker room the same way it compounds in your office, through small deposits repeated until people change what they expect from each other.

Six months after a change effort is when you find out whether it actually worked. Not during the rollout, when attention is high and the new way of working is still novel. Six months later, when the next crisis has arrived and the champion who drove the initiative has moved on to something else. That's when you find out whether the improvement was built into the structure or just held in place by effort.

Sometimes, the reason the problem persists isn't that leadership doesn't see it. It's that fixing it requires someone powerful to give something up. To accept a constraint. To close off an option they've been keeping quietly open. When that's the case, no framing fixes it completely. What good framing can do is make the cost of doing nothing explicit enough that the conversation has to happen, even when it's uncomfortable.

What most organizations do under pressure is fix things near the surface. The urgency is real, and fixes at the execution and systems level produce visible results fast. The problem is that a fix at the wrong level doesn't just fail to solve the problem. It spends capital, creates change fatigue, and gives the skeptics more evidence that nothing ever really changes. The willingness to attempt the harder fix, the one at the right level, gets weaker every time the wrong one is

What makes organizational diagnosis so hard? The place where the pain is visible and the place where the pain originates are almost never the same.

The team that needs to move fast is stuck in an approval process built for work that needs to be stable. The team that needs to think carefully before acting is being pushed into sprint cycles built for work that benefits from moving fast. Each of them is working against the structure rather than with it. Under normal load that's a manageable annoyance. Under higher load it's the thing that's breaking everything. Understanding this changes how you read what you're seeing.

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.

If a system keeps producing the same problem, what's it actually doing? The answer, more often than most leaders expect, is that it's protecting something. That's a loaded way to put it, so let's get specific about what it means. Organizations aren't conscious, so they can’t make decisions to protect things. But they do develop patterns over time, and those patterns tend to persist, even when they're also causing visible harm.

Recognizing that feeling of "here we go again" is one of the most useful signals an organization or team can produce. But we don't treat it that way because repetition feels like failure. If the problem came back, someone didn't fix it right or didn't follow through. So the response to the repetition is usually the same as the response to the first one, just with more frustration behind it. Added threats or incentives. A more detailed plan. And usually, a similar result.

It’s a meeting every leader is familiar with. The problem on the table isn't new. It might have been around for months, maybe longer. The people in the room understand that it’s important to fix the issue. But somewhere in the middle of the discussion, you can feel the conversation start to circle. Someone suggests a fix that was tried before. Someone else raises the same objection that was raised before. The meeting ends with an action item or two, but a couple months later

The points where work breaks down are often the same points where teams are pushing back against each other the hardest. From the outside, it looks like a people problem. So the natural response is to get everyone on the same page. Leaders push shared goals, encourage more collaboration, try to get teams working the same way. The assumption is that if everyone agrees on what matters, the friction goes away. It rarely does. The tension is usually coming from the work itsel

By the time something surfaces as a visible issue, the conditions that produced it have already been in place for a while. Work has already moved through several stages. Decisions have already been made. Tradeoffs have already been accepted, often without anyone realizing they were making them. The system has already narrowed things down to a small set of possible outcomes, and one of them just showed up as the problem. And now, the org is reacting to something it has no hope

When the same type of result keeps showing up, the system isn't failing intermittently. It's behaving consistently. The outcome looks like a problem, but from the system's perspective, it's just what happens given how the work is set up, how it moves, and how decisions get made under pressure. Not random. Predictable.