Andrew Power
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7 signs your system is quietly failing

And nobody has looked. The system still runs. The numbers still come out. Here is how to tell what it is really doing.

  • The seven signs, with a real example of each
  • Three questions to ask for every sign
  • A one-page checklist you can take to a team meeting

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The seven signs

Tick each one you recognise.

0of 7

If you recognise two or more, the system has changed shape and nobody has been close enough to see it.

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  1. Everybody has their own way of doing it.

    Ask three people how the job gets done and you get three answers. None of them is the written process. The workaround is the real requirements document. The official process is the draft.

    The tell: a spreadsheet on somebody's desktop that the whole team depends on.

  2. The report goes in on time and tells you nothing.

    It satisfies the obligation. Nobody has asked a question about it in a year. Compliance is a floor somebody else set, and it has quietly replaced the question the report was meant to answer.

    The tell: the report is read for whether it arrived, not for what it says.

  3. You are measuring what is easy to count.

    The number still comes out every month. Nobody remembers which decision it was for. A measure can outlive its question by years, and people will keep feeding it.

    The tell: a target is being hit and the thing it stood for is getting worse.

  4. The fix on the table is another hire.

    Hiring a person does not fix an information problem. It gives the workaround a salary. If the new role exists to chase, remind, re-enter or reconcile, the system is asking a person to be its memory.

    The tell: the job description is a list of things the system should already do.

  5. Each part works. It fails in between.

    Every team can show you their piece is fine, and they are right. The failures happen at the handover, where the work changes hands and nobody owns the gap.

    The tell: a problem that every team has reported and no team has fixed.

  6. The people who know and the people who decide never meet.

    The knowledge sits with the people doing the work. The risk sits with the people in the boardroom. When there is no path between the two, decisions get made on a description of the work, not the work.

    The tell: consultation that happens after the decision.

  7. A person is being blamed for a process problem.

    Someone's ability keeps getting read as attitude. Often the process is asking a tired person to remember something, or a filter built for somebody else is recording the result as a fact about their character.

    The tell: the same 'performance issue' with the last person in that seat.
Who wrote it

Somebody has to go and look.

I am Andrew Power. I get brought in for the questions nobody has been able to answer. Usually that means a process everyone has quietly written off as unfixable.

Twenty-one years of leading teams, most of it in the non-profit sector, across eight sectors. The seven signs are the ones I keep finding.

More about me

Ten minutes to read. One meeting to use.

Get the seven signs, the questions and the checklist.

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