The waste the company has learned to sustain

In many companies we have worked with over the years, we have found variations of the same phenomenon: problems kept coming back. Not exactly the same, not always in the same place, but they came back. Shortcuts were created to deal with each of them. Most of the time, there was someone responsible for the problem, already tired of living with it in its different symptomatic manifestations. What should have been the exception became the rule. When this happens, we say the problem has "become part of the scenery." It becomes part of life as if it were a picture on the wall. People learn to live with it. 

The first reading of why this happens tends to be superficial: lack of method and discipline. It takes time to understand that these causes explain little. Managers and teams spend time and energy "solving" today what “had already been solved” yesterday. Effort shifts from improving the process and building something new to keeping the operation running. That is the definition we adopt here for managerial rework: recurring action to minimize the undesired effects of problems that have not yet been solved. This effort is rarely reflected in indicators, but it is written all over people's faces.

Competent companies, with capable individuals and experienced leaders, live for years with the same failures without actually addressing them. A provocative explanation is that these companies end up sustaining this kind of rework, creating the conditions necessary for it to perpetuate itself. Around the phenomenon they build a structure of people, anticipated exceptions and informal knowledge, generating a kind of “habit” without which, incredible as it may seem, the operation starts having difficulty functioning. And they do this for long enough that no one can any longer distinguish effective management from what is merely a way of compensating for gaps. 

‘Protective’ rework 

Managerial rework, therefore, serves this function: it keeps the operation delivering and protects certain decisions from being revisited. It sustains the relevance of people who know how to navigate what official channels do not resolve. While it plays this role, it remains invisible in reports, but perfectly visible in the daily lives of those who do the work.

Recent research helps size part of this invisible cost. In the Anatomy of Work Index, Asana estimated that knowledge workers spent 58% of their time on work coordination activities, such as meetings, messages, searching for information and status updates, instead of devoting themselves to the skilled work they were hired for. McKinsey identified a similar picture among middle managers, frequently consumed by daily crises, bureaucracy and activities that contribute little to building future capabilities. 

The mechanism by which this takes hold is more human than technical. In an environment where the recurring problem is the norm, solving it "again" seems to have social value. It gives visibility, because it creates informal references of competence. It distributes power to those who hold the tacit knowledge of how things really work. When this goes on long enough, rework stops being a symptom and becomes part of the organizational identity. The people who sustain it are competent within a system that trained them for this and depends on them to keep functioning. The relevant question then becomes why recurrence continues to be tolerated.

Part of the answer lies in a distinction that is rarely made with due care. Art Smalley, in Four Types of Problems, shows that failures of different natures call for different ways of thinking and acting. Some situations require immediate containment; others, disciplined investigation of the deviation from a standard; and some, the building of a future condition that does not yet exist. Treating them all with the same logic is applying energy in the wrong place. 

The result is predictable. Containment becomes a permanent solution. Ambitious initiatives are launched where basic stability is lacking. And accelerated execution is demanded when systemic understanding is still missing. Managerial rework is also born of this imprecise reading of the nature of the problem itself and of the decisions that follow from it. 

The most uncomfortable reason rarely appears explicitly. Investigating the root cause of a recurring problem tends to lead to disturbing places, such as poorly designed structures, conflicting targets, misguided investments, standards that were never defined (because defining them would have required a conflict that nobody wanted to take on at a given moment). 

Managerial rework often works as protection against these questions. As long as the operation keeps delivering, even at the cost of additional effort and dependence on key people, there is not enough determination to revisit what lies at the origin. Permanent containment creates a comfort zone for those who should be questioning the origin of the problem. 

Organizing superficiality 

There is yet another dimension. Problems often reach leadership incomplete. They are held back by teams for fear of judgment, blame or retaliation. What shows up in formal meetings is, in many cases, an edited version of reality. Decisions made on that basis tend to treat symptoms that may not even be the most relevant ones. We have seen this repeatedly. Companies applied the right methods, followed the appropriate steps, trained teams and, even so, struggled to sustain performance. 

Before any tool, there is a more fundamental effort to be undertaken, which involves creating conditions for people to reveal what they know, clarify what they perceive and build together a shared understanding of the problem. Psychological safety and minimum consensus underpin the method, which, otherwise, when it meets a poorly characterized problem, merely organizes superficiality. 

In these cases, generic explanations close the investigation too early. Lack of communication, attention and training may even appear in the diagnosis, but they rarely explain the recurrence of a problem on their own. Most of the time, they point to more concrete issues, such as poorly defined responsibilities, ambiguous standards and fragile interfaces between areas. When leadership accepts the shallow explanation, it loses the chance to see the specific mechanism that keeps the problem alive. 

Companies measure delays, defects, productivity and customer ratings, but rarely estimate the managerial energy consumed just to keep the operation running. What fails to happen is even less visible. Every hour of leadership spent containing the same problem represents time that was no longer devoted to developing people, thinking about strategy or building future capabilities. 

Managers who spend years operating in emergency mode develop precise reflexes for solving crises and a progressively smaller capacity to see beyond them. It is the natural result of a routine that trains for the short term and narrows the field of vision. Leadership that depends on this profile to function reproduces, without realizing it, the condition that produced it. 

Change begins when recurrence comes to be treated as concrete evidence, and not merely as "natural" noise in the operation. A problem that comes back carries information about some condition of the work that keeps producing variation, loss or instability. As long as that condition remains poorly understood, the organization keeps responding to the effects. Containing the problem can protect the customer and mitigate the consequences in the short term. Solving it frees up energy to act on other fronts, preparing the conditions for the future.