Every team has one. The person who just handles it. The invoice that never quite imports, the report that breaks on the first of the month, the customer whose order needs a nudge through the system. Ask how it got fixed and the answer is a name. Ask what they actually did and the room goes quiet.

That person is doing two jobs. The one on their job description, and a second, invisible one: absorbing the cost of a process that does not work. Their competence is the reason the failure survives. If the fix were painful for everyone, it would have been repaired properly years ago. Instead it is painful for one person, quietly, every week, and quiet pain does not get budget.

The vacation test

You find out how much of your operation lives in one head the week that head goes on holiday. The first of the month arrives. The report breaks. Three people discover at the same time that nobody else knows the workaround, because the workaround was never a process. It was a person.

This is not a people problem.…