For years, I was on a plane almost every couple of weeks. There were meetings to attend, customers to see, teams to support, and decisions that appeared to require my presence. I had spent much of my career in advertising, technology, and entrepreneurship, where keeping things moving was an important part of being good at the job.

And things did keep moving.

Then the pandemic stopped the travel, and something became difficult to ignore. The professional output I had been producing told only part of the story. My health was not the best, important relationships had received less attention than they needed, and I had become accustomed to using work and movement to keep the rest of life at a distance.

That experience did not prove that a particular employer or business was dysfunctional. What it exposed was how easily I had used visible performance as evidence that the wider arrangement was working.

I have been interested in that distinction ever since.

Earlier this month, the leadership development company DDI published its Global Leadership Forecast 2027. Its survey of more than 11,000 leaders found that only 17 percent felt confident about anticipating and responding to change. Nearly one in five reported frequently feeling used up at the end of the working day.

Many of these leaders were still doing their jobs.

The obvious interpretation is that organizations need to help their leaders manage change, recover better, and become more resilient. Those things may be necessary. But there is another question worth asking before prescribing more support.

How much of what appears to be a functioning organization depends on people quietly making up for what the organization cannot do?

The Work That Never Appears In The Plan

Consider what happens when a project is delivered on time.

The customer gets what was promised. The deadline is met. The meeting ends with an acknowledgment that the team performed well.

What the final result may not reveal is that someone had to chase information that should have arrived automatically, resolve an ambiguity between departments, work late to correct an error, or remember a decision that was never properly documented.

When a person does this well, the problem often disappears before anybody else notices it.

The customer has no reason to complain. The manager sees a successful delivery. The next project is planned using much the same assumptions as the previous one.

The person who intervened knows something different. They know the result required more effort than the system was designed to provide.

I have encountered versions of this pattern in conversations with founders and executives. Being indispensable can become part of how someone understands their value. Delegation is postponed because explaining the task seems harder than doing it. An uncomfortable conversation is avoided because resolving the immediate issue oneself appears more efficient. The founder becomes increasingly skilled at bridging gaps that the company never learns to close.

Often, these are genuinely capable people.

That is part of what makes the pattern difficult to recognize.

When Solving The Problem Prevents Learning

More than twenty years ago, researchers Anita Tucker and Amy Edmondson studied how nurses handled recurring operational failures in hospitals.

The nurses faced the kinds of problems familiar to anyone who has worked inside a complex organization: missing supplies, incomplete information, poorly coordinated processes, and unexpected demands.

Their response was usually resourceful. If something was missing, they found it elsewhere. If a process failed, they worked around it. The immediate priority was to provide the care the patient needed, and the nurses were often remarkably effective at doing that.

But the researchers noticed a troubling consequence. Many of the problems were solved locally without correcting the conditions that produced them.

A nurse borrowing supplies from another unit may protect the patient from a shortage, and the hospital can continue functioning, even though the supply problem remains. Tomorrow, another nurse may need to solve exactly the same problem.

The original obstacle has been removed from the patient’s experience, but not from the organization.

This was not a criticism of the nurses. They were responding to real demands, often without the time, authority, or support required to redesign the processes that had failed them.

The research revealed something more unsettling about organizational learning: a system can be surrounded by evidence that it needs to change while the people who maintain it are too busy compensating for its weaknesses to ensure that evidence becomes actionable.

The immediate problem gets solved. The recurring problem survives.

What The Output Doesn’t Tell Us

Psychologist G. Robert Hockey described a related phenomenon in his work on compensatory control.

Under stress or high workload, people may preserve their primary performance by recruiting additional effort and changing how they allocate attention. The observable result can remain stable even as the subjective, behavioral, or physiological cost increases.

Someone can still complete the assignment, make the decision, deliver the presentation, and keep the household organized. The outcome alone does not tell us what it took to produce it.

That distinction matters because most operating systems, from businesses to family routines, are remarkably dependent on what they can observe.

A founder who repeatedly prevents problems from reaching customers may conclude that the company is operating effectively. A manager whose team continually meets deadlines may see little reason to revisit its workload. A family whose appointments, meals, and obligations are always coordinated may never need to confront how much of that coordination rests on one person’s memory and attention.

Successful compensation can make the existing arrangement appear more viable than it is.

Eventually, the additional effort may begin to feel ordinary to the person providing it. They get better at anticipating the problem, faster at resolving it, and more practiced at absorbing the consequences.

This is where the mechanism becomes especially interesting.

The person keeps learning how to compensate. The surrounding system may never learn how to stop needing that compensation.

And when the effort becomes predictable, it can quietly enter the expectations of everyone who benefits from it.

A deadline that required an exceptional effort this month may become next month’s ordinary deadline. A founder’s willingness to answer every question becomes a reason nobody develops independent judgment. A caregiver’s ability to remember everything becomes the arrangement around which other people organize their responsibilities.

Nobody necessarily makes an explicit decision to build dependence on the compensator. The pattern develops because the immediate result keeps arriving.

The Difference Between Helping And Hiding

Good leaders do not become effective by refusing to help.

A founder who remains close to customers may learn things that would never appear on a dashboard. A manager who steps into difficult work can discover where procedures fail and where employees lack the information or authority they need. Being involved can improve a system’s capacity to learn.

But the same action can also prevent learning.

The difference lies partly in what happens to the information gathered through the intervention.

If a founder resolves a recurring handoff failure and the company subsequently clarifies responsibility, improves information flow, or changes the process, the intervention has helped the business develop.

If the founder resolves the same handoff failure every week, the immediate output may remain impressive while the dependence grows.

The action can look identical from the outside, but its consequences are different.

This is why the familiar recommendation to delegate more is often insufficient. Delegation can simply transfer a badly designed responsibility to someone else. If the information, authority, or coordination that made the task difficult remain unchanged, the problem moves with the assignment.

It is also why some organizations misunderstand resilience.

There are moments when extra effort is necessary. A genuine emergency requires people to adapt. A difficult quarter may demand more than an ordinary one. Families and workplaces both need the capacity to respond to disruption.

The difficulty begins when the exceptional response becomes the everyday requirement.

If a standard Tuesday repeatedly depends on heroic adaptability, the operating arrangement deserves attention of its own.

Recovery Cannot Carry The Whole Burden

This is also where the current conversation about burnout recovery becomes more consequential.

Exercise, sleep, therapy, time away from work, meditation, and breathwork can all serve useful purposes. They may help people regulate, recover, and respond more effectively to demands.

But there is a limit to what these interventions can accomplish when the person returns to exactly the same pattern that made the additional support necessary.

A better recovery routine can help someone tolerate a difficult period. It does not establish that the difficult period should have become permanent.

I know how attractive the alternative explanation can be. When I was still operating inside a demanding professional life, it was easier to treat the next period of travel, the next deadline, or the next stretch of effort as something to get through. The wider cost was distributed across parts of life that did not report their condition through professional performance metrics.

As long as the work was getting done, there was always a reason to continue.

This does not mean that every recurring strain has a simple structural solution. A nurse cannot leave a patient without care to make a point about procurement. A parent cannot abandon a child’s needs because responsibilities are uneven. An employee may have limited power to change the design of a role.

It would be easy to turn the argument into another demand placed on the people already carrying too much: identify the dysfunction, make it visible, redesign the system, and somehow continue meeting every obligation in the meantime.

That would reproduce the problem in a different form.

The more useful distinction is between a workaround that helps people through an unavoidable difficulty and one that has become a permanent substitute for addressing a recurring condition.

We should be able to acknowledge the value of the first without normalizing the second.

What The System Has Learned

I keep coming back to the nurses in Tucker and Edmondson’s research.

Their resourcefulness was real. So was the care they provided.

The problem was not that they had become too good at their jobs. It was that the organization could continue receiving the benefit of their resourcefulness without necessarily receiving the information required to improve the system.

Something similar happens wherever people are rewarded for keeping things running while the cost of doing so remains private.

The employee learns to anticipate problems. The founder learns to make one more decision. The parent learns to remember one more obligation. Each becomes more capable of maintaining the arrangement.

Meanwhile, the arrangement itself may remain unchanged.

There is no reason to celebrate preventable failures or deliberately expose people to harm. What matters is whether the effort required to avoid those failures remains invisible, or whether it becomes information that someone with the necessary authority can act upon.

Sometimes the most important thing a competent person can contribute is not another successful rescue. It is an accurate account of why the rescue was necessary.

Because when a system repeatedly receives the result it expects, it has very little reason to question how that result was produced.

And if your continued effort keeps closing the same gap, the gap may never become visible enough for anyone to change it.

Notes and sources

DDI, Global Leadership Forecast 2027, first installment released October 14, 2026. Survey of 11,395 leaders and 2,519 HR professionals across more than 50 countries. The findings on change readiness and exhaustion are self-reported associations, not direct evidence of the compensation mechanism argued here.
Tucker, A. L., Edmondson, A. C., and Spear, S. (2002). "When problem solving prevents organizational learning." Journal of Organizational Change Management, 15(2), 122–137.
Tucker, A. L., and Edmondson, A. C. (2003). "Why Hospitals Don't Learn from Failures: Organizational and Psychological Dynamics That Inhibit System Change." California Management Review, 45(2), 55–72.
Tucker, A. L. (2004). "The impact of operational failures on hospital nurses and their patients." Journal of Operations Management, 22(2), 151–169.
Hockey, G. R. J. (1997). "Compensatory control in the regulation of human performance under stress and high workload: A cognitive-energetical framework." Biological Psychology, 45(1–3), 73–93.
Marc Shorb (2026). "7 Warning Signs of Burnout That Entrepreneurs Need to Watch For." Founder Reports, June 24. Includes Oscar Trelles's observations on apparently functional founder performance and hidden deterioration.