How People Cope

Chapter 3: Activity Without Reality

When closing a ticket becomes the goal rather than changing the system, the representation has replaced the thing it was meant to represent. An eleven-week, €380,000 migration that produced no observable change in customer experience illustrates how activity substitutes for progress.

A migration originally estimated to require a single sprint ended up consuming eleven weeks.

A B2B SaaS company with 800 employees, roughly 300 of them in engineering, had committed in its annual roadmap to “modernising the platform.” The commitment originated in a strategy offsite. No engineer attended the offsite. The phrase “modernise the platform” appeared on slide nine of a forty-slide deck, beneath a pillar labelled “Operational Excellence.”

By the time the phrase reached the engineering organisation, it had been interpreted as a migration from an on-premises message broker to a managed cloud service. The rationale was never written down in a form that connected it to a customer outcome. When a team lead asked what problem the migration solved for customers, he was told it was “a platform concern” and that the business case had already been approved.

Two teams were assigned. They spent the first three weeks discovering that the existing message broker was entangled with a legacy billing reconciliation service that no one had documented. The reconciliation service used message headers in ways that the cloud service did not support. A third team was pulled in to build an adapter. The adapter required access to a shared schema that a fourth team nominally owned but had not changed in two years.

Eleven weeks later, the migration was complete. Monitoring showed no change in throughput, latency, or error rates. From the customer's perspective, the experience remained completely unchanged, as the underlying billing reconciliation process operated exactly as before. The total cost, including lost velocity on deferred work, was approximately € 380,000.

The migration was reported as a success. The teams involved were thanked in a town hall. The roadmap for the following quarter listed three more modernisation items.

No one asked whether the original commitment should have been made. No one could, because the commitment had no traceable origin in a customer need or a system constraint. It existed because the roadmap required content, and modernisation is always defensible. Software-dependent corporates are rarely idle. They are busy in a very specific and highly disciplined way.

Calendars are full, backlogs are long, and roadmaps extend confidently into the future. Dashboards glow with colour while meetings conclude with action items, follow-ups, and alignment checkpoints. Documents are produced, reviewed, socialised, revised, and approved. From the outside, these organisations appear intensely productive.

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