Almost every business process has a human-shaped dependency (where the risk is managed outside the SOP)
The biggest issue is that this resembles an asymptomatic disease. When processes survive the hero's exit (with another hero) then the dependency remains. And when a process dies with the hero's exit, the failure is blamed on something less embarrassing and everyone moves on
Yes. “Asymptomatic disease” is exactly the right frame!
That is what makes hero-mode dependency so hard to fix. If the process survives because another hero steps in, leadership calls it resilience. If the process dies, leadership often blames the person, the timing, the vendor, the market, or the migration.
Anything except the route.
The real diagnostic question is not, “Did the process survive?”
It is, “What did the process require in order to survive, and did we just normalize that cost again?”
The scariest dependency in your organization probably does not look like a risk.
It looks like the person everyone trusts.
The person who knows the release path.
The person who remembers the customer exception.
The person who can explain why the old workaround still exists.
That is what makes hero mode so dangerous. It feels safe right up until it does not.
In this piece, I’m asking a question every engineering and product leader should be able to answer before the resignation notice arrives:
If the person who saves every release disappeared for 30 days, what would your team suddenly discover it never actually knew?
Drop the first critical path that comes to mind. Not the person’s name. The path.
Almost every business process has a human-shaped dependency (where the risk is managed outside the SOP)
The biggest issue is that this resembles an asymptomatic disease. When processes survive the hero's exit (with another hero) then the dependency remains. And when a process dies with the hero's exit, the failure is blamed on something less embarrassing and everyone moves on
This circus continues with none the wiser!
Yes. “Asymptomatic disease” is exactly the right frame!
That is what makes hero-mode dependency so hard to fix. If the process survives because another hero steps in, leadership calls it resilience. If the process dies, leadership often blames the person, the timing, the vendor, the market, or the migration.
Anything except the route.
The real diagnostic question is not, “Did the process survive?”
It is, “What did the process require in order to survive, and did we just normalize that cost again?”