The Split

Chapter 2: Why People Closest to Reality Suffer

The people most punished by structural dysfunction are those whose effectiveness depends on contact with actual systems. The organisation selects for fluency in narrative over fluency in reality, then calls the result a talent shortage.

Why People Closest to Reality Suffer It happens quietly, far from any crisis or confrontation.

A principal engineer at an online fashion marketplace flags a risk in an architecture review. The risk is acknowledged but deprioritised. She points out that a commitment made to the board cannot be delivered as described. She is told to “find a way.” She suggests an alternative approach that would achieve the goal more reliably. The suggestion is described as “too technical” for the current discussion.

After enough of these exchanges, she stops. Not because she has lost the knowledge. She still sees the problems clearly, still traces the dependencies in her head, still knows which parts of the system are fragile and why. The cost of stating what she sees, however, has become higher than the cost of staying silent. She learns that the organisation does not want the information she has but compliance wrapped in technical language.

An operations analyst at a logistics company maintains a spreadsheet that nobody asked her to create.

It tracks every exception in the fulfilment process: the customers whose orders require manual intervention, the carrier routes where the standard SLA does not apply, the product categories that need special handling documentation, the warehouses where the inventory system's count diverges from physical stock by more than the acceptable threshold. The spreadsheet has forty-seven columns. She updates it daily. It is the only accurate record of how the fulfilment process actually works, as opposed to how the system says it works.

When the company decides to replace its order management system, nobody consults her. The requirements are gathered from process owners who describe the process as it is documented, not as it operates. The new system is specified, built, and launched over fourteen months.

Within three weeks of go-live, the same exceptions return. Carriers flag shipments that do not meet special handling requirements. Warehouse staff discover that the inventory reconciliation logic does not account for the discrepancies they have been managing manually for years. Customer service begins receiving complaints about orders that the old system would have routed to manual review but the new system processes automatically, and incorrectly.

She rebuilds the spreadsheet. It takes her two weeks. She adds twelve new columns for exception types that the new system has introduced. Nobody asks where the spreadsheet came from, or why it is necessary, or what it implies about the system that was supposed to replace it.

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See also: Full contents · Preview chapters · Illusions in the Boardroom