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 had committed in its annual roadmap to “modernising the platform,” a phrase that originated at a strategy offsite no engineer attended. By the time it reached engineering, it had become a migration from an on-premises message broker to a managed cloud service. When a team lead asked what problem this solved for customers, he was told the business case had already been approved.

Two teams were assigned, then a third, as they discovered the broker was entangled with an undocumented legacy billing reconciliation service that the cloud service could not accommodate.

Eleven weeks later, monitoring showed no change in throughput, latency, or error rates, and the customer's experience was unaltered. The total cost, including lost velocity on deferred work, was approximately € 380,000.

The migration was reported as a success, and the roadmap for the following quarter listed three more modernisation items. No one asked whether the original commitment should have been made; it had no traceable origin in a customer need or a system constraint, only in a roadmap that required content, and modernisation is always defensible. Software-dependent corporates are rarely idle. They are busy in a specific and 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.

Yet one simple question exposes the gap between activity and progress: what exactly changed in the world as a result of all this activity? The answer is often vague, contested, or deferred.

The illusion is the substitution of activity for progress. It is the most pervasive illusion, and the hardest to see from inside.

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