“Only Jane knows how that works.”
It is usually said as reassurance.
Something unusual has happened, the process does not quite fit, a customer needs different handling or somebody cannot work out what happened last time. Jane gets involved, the issue moves again and everyone carries on.
Nothing appears broken. In fact, Jane often looks like one of the reasons the organisation works as well as it does.
The harder question is what has quietly become dependent on her being available.
Because once important work repeatedly needs the same person’s knowledge, judgement or memory before it can move, resilience is no longer sitting entirely inside the operating model. Some of it is being supplied informally, one intervention at a time.
The obvious concern is what happens if Jane leaves.
The more immediate commercial signal is what is already happening while she stays.
What this usually looks like in practice
The dependency rarely begins with a deliberate decision to make one person indispensable. It forms through ordinary work.
Jane was there when the process changed. She remembers why an exception was agreed. She knows which system field cannot quite be relied upon, which customer needs different handling and who to call when two parts of the organisation do not line up as neatly as the process suggests.
So people ask her.
The first few times, that is simply sensible. She knows the answer and asking her is faster than reconstructing it from scratch.
Then the same thing happens again.
A colleague hits an unusual case and involves Jane. Somebody new joins and is told that she is the person to speak to. A manager needs something moved quickly and knows Jane can navigate the awkward part. An exception becomes familiar enough that nobody regards it as particularly exceptional anymore.
There may still be procedures, systems and named owners. The formal process can look perfectly reasonable. Yet the way work actually gets completed has begun to depend on an informal route through one person’s experience.
That gap matters because it changes what “the process works” really means.
It may mean the process works because Jane repeatedly closes the gaps around it.
The dependency can look like expertise for a long time
A capable person can hide an operating dependency remarkably well.
Jane does not create visible disruption. She prevents it. She resolves the unusual case, remembers the missing detail, connects people who would otherwise struggle to find each other and spots the problem before it turns into something larger.
From a distance, that looks like expertise doing exactly what expertise should do.
The distinction only becomes important when her intervention stops being occasional and becomes part of what normal delivery requires.
At that point, successful recovery can disguise the underlying condition. The awkward handoff does not attract much attention because Jane handles it. The gap in knowledge does not stop delivery because she remembers the answer. The recurring exception does not become a visible problem because somebody reliable keeps absorbing it.
The dependency therefore remains easy to underestimate precisely because the workaround is effective.
Over time, behaviour adjusts around that effectiveness. People learn whom to ask rather than noticing how often the question arises. Managers see completed work rather than the intervention required to complete it. New colleagues inherit the workaround as part of “how things are done here”.
Jane’s expertise remains genuinely valuable.
What has changed is that the organisation has started relying on that expertise to compensate for a condition that the formal operating model does not fully carry.
That is when “Jane knows how that works” stops being only a compliment and starts becoming an operating signal.
The cost starts before anything actually fails
Concentrated knowledge creates cost while the knowledgeable person is still present and the work is still getting done.
The cost is rarely dramatic enough to appear as a single line on a dashboard. It accumulates through interruptions, waiting, repeated explanation and capacity being used to protect continuity.
Jane is pulled away from the work that genuinely requires her level of experience because somebody needs a quick answer. A colleague pauses until she is free. A decision waits because she understands the history behind it. Several small exceptions arrive at once and progress compresses around the same point.
Each event can look minor.
Together, they change the economics of the work.
The organisation is paying for Jane’s time, but some of that time is now being spent repeatedly enabling work that cannot move without her. Other people remain busy, yet some of their output depends on access to the same scarce capacity. Management attention is absorbed when the queue becomes visible, even though the reason it keeps forming may remain hidden.
This is how a constraint absorbs effort without producing an obvious failure.
The commercial effect appears in several places at once: work takes longer than expected, experienced capacity is consumed by interruption, other priorities wait and management effort increases to keep apparently routine delivery moving.
Nothing needs to have “gone wrong” for that cost to be real.
In many organisations, the workaround continues because absorbing this friction still feels easier than confronting the fact that the operating model has become dependent upon it.
The longer that continues, the more normal the cost becomes.
More effort does not remove the point where progress slows
When leaders see work slowing, they can quite reasonably respond by adding effort.
More people become involved. Priorities are reinforced. Meetings increase. Somebody documents the process more thoroughly. Jane may be asked to train colleagues while still handling the exceptions and questions that already consume her time.
Activity rises, yet the underlying constraint may remain exactly where it was.
If difficult work still needs Jane before it can move, then the additional effort is surrounding the dependency rather than removing it. People may become better at managing the queue, sharing information or escalating quickly, but progress still compresses when work reaches the same point.
This is where structural lag becomes visible.
It explains why effort not converting into progress can persist even inside capable, hard-working teams. The problem is not necessarily that too little effort is being applied. It is that more effort continues to meet a constraint which absorbs it.
The pattern becomes commercially significant when progress repeatedly slows at the same point regardless of how much activity surrounds it. Work may be moving on either side, but the same dependency continues determining the pace at which progress can actually accumulate.
That is why simply adding resource can be deceptive. The organisation sees more activity and may even see more completed tasks, while the critical path through the work remains dependent on the same knowledge, person or handoff.
Left unchecked, this usually becomes more embedded before it becomes easier to see.
The workaround gains history. More people learn to use it. More assumptions form around its availability. Processes, plans and customer expectations quietly begin to depend upon it.
At that point the dependency is no longer sitting alongside the operating model.
For practical purposes, it has become part of it.
The warning is not that Jane might leave
Jane leaving would expose the dependency.
It would not create it.
The more useful warning signs exist while she is still there and everything still appears manageable: work waits for her availability, unusual cases routinely find their way to her, colleagues know certain things are difficult without her and managers have started planning around the fact that she will probably need to intervene.
That condition can persist for a long time.
It becomes harder to ignore when demand rises, several exceptions arrive together, Jane takes leave, the business grows or another change alters the environment around the workaround. What previously looked like a reliable way of keeping things moving suddenly has to carry more pressure than it can absorb.
The visible failure may arrive quickly.
The dependency has usually been forming much more slowly.
That is the significance of pre-failure instability: the organisation can still be delivering while resilience is already weakening underneath the visible result. The warning is not simply whether the business could cope if Jane disappeared tomorrow. It is whether continuity, speed or confidence already depend on her repeated intervention today.
The same pattern appears at greater scale. Jane may be a specialist team, a long-serving manager, a particular supplier or the handful of people who understand how several parts of a programme really connect.
The name changes. The operating behaviour does not.
The expertise itself is not the problem. The signal appears when valuable expertise becomes the point through which ordinary progress repeatedly has to pass.
Because once everyone knows that “only Jane knows how that works”, the organisation may already be describing the place where hidden effort, delay and dependency have become normal.
Where is effort being absorbed without producing equivalent progress?
Related observations
Programme Delivery Loses Traction
Delivery can remain visibly active while a recurring point of friction steadily weakens the amount of progress that accumulates.
Effort Not Converting Into Progress
More effort does not necessarily improve movement when the same constraint continues absorbing capacity at the same point.
https://www.ibcrus.co.uk/effort-not-converting-into-progress/
Pre-Failure Delivery Instability
Visible delivery can continue while the conditions underneath it are becoming progressively less stable.