Why hiring someone won't fix your information problem.
The conversation almost always arrives the same way. Things keep falling through, everyone is stretched, and the answer on the table is a new role. Sometimes it is already in the budget. Occasionally it has already been advertised.
I understand the logic. Work is not getting done, so add somebody to do it. But it treats a process problem like a headcount problem, and the two fail very differently.
What actually happens
The new person arrives into exactly the same gaps. They are capable, so within a month they have built their own way through the mess. They are quicker at it than the last person. Things improve, visibly, and everybody agrees the hire was the right call.
What has actually happened is that the workaround now has a salary attached. The gaps are still there. They are being absorbed by a human being instead of being fixed, and that human being is now the only one who knows how any of it works.
You have not closed the leak. You have hired somebody to stand in it.
The bit nobody budgets for
Two years later that person resigns, and the organisation discovers it has quietly outsourced its institutional memory to one contract. Everything they were absorbing comes back at once, and it comes back worse, because the original process has had two more years of nobody looking at it.
This is the expensive version. It never appears on a line item, because the cost is spread across a resignation, a handover, a recruitment round, and about six months of things going missing again.
What to ask first
Before the role goes to the board, ask one question. If this person were brilliant and then left after eighteen months, what would break?
If the honest answer is everything they were holding together, you do not have a staffing gap. You have a design gap, and the hire will hide it for exactly as long as they stay.
Sometimes the answer is still to hire, and that is fine. But hire them to build the thing that closes the gap, not to be the thing that closes it.