Pascal BORNET's Post

Pascal BORNET · article · 2026-08-01 Reader 🖥️

Feedback Loops Learning Culture & Slack Organizational Debt

Organizations mistake a team's ability to keep performing despite a broken system (endurance, sustained by workarounds and quiet compensation from strong employees and loyal managers) for evidence that the system itself is healthy, and leaders should instead treat the places demanding the most resilience as the places most in need of structural redesign.

practical · argumentative — A short LinkedIn maxim-post. It opens with a theoretical diagnostic claim (organizations conflate endurance with health) but the whole piece is in service of a practical imperative: leaders should look past outcomes and redesign structures that require constant heroics. No case study or worked example — the argument is carried entirely by aphorism and a compressed causal sketch, not evidence.

Structure

Part	Role
Bolded opening line: 'Your team's resilience may be protecting a broken system.'	Thesis statement, stated up front
The workaround-becomes-permanent mechanism: a team finds a workaround, performance recovers, leaders conclude the system works, the workaround quietly becomes part of the operating model	Causal mechanism / evidence sketch (asserted, not demonstrated)
'That is how dysfunction becomes invisible' — strong employees compensate, loyal managers protect outdated structures, good results suppress the felt need to intervene	Generalization of the mechanism from one team's workaround to organization-wide invisibility
Bolded restatement: 'Success doesn't always prove that the system works. Sometimes it proves that people have learned to survive it.'	Aphoristic sharpening of the thesis — the rhetorical center of the piece
Prescription: leaders should look beyond outcomes and ask where people are quietly compensating for structural failure; 'the places requiring the most resilience are often the places requiring redesign'	Practical conclusion / call to action
Closing question to readers: 'What problem has your team become too good at working around?'	Engagement hook, restates the diagnostic as a self-directed prompt

Key terms

resilience
The capacity of people (strong employees, loyal managers) to absorb and mask a structurally broken process by working around it — used almost entirely pejoratively, as a symptom to be suspicious of rather than a strength to cultivate.
endurance vs. health
Endurance = the system keeps producing acceptable results. Health = the system does not require people to compensate for its flaws in order to produce those results. The post's core distinction: sustained output (endurance) is not proof of a well-functioning underlying structure (health).
workaround
An informal fix that begins as a temporary patch but, once it restores performance, quietly becomes a permanent, load-bearing part of 'the operating model' rather than being removed.

Propositions

explicitOrganizations often confuse endurance (a team continuing to perform) with health (a system that doesn't require people to compensate for its own flaws).conf: high
explicitWhen a team finds a workaround and performance recovers, leaders often wrongly conclude the underlying system is functioning well.conf: high
explicitWorkarounds tend to become permanent parts of the operating model rather than staying temporary fixes.conf: high
supportsPresentation: The Human Scalability Problem: Why Your Teams Don't Scale Like Your Code · p6 — Both name the same failure mode — organizations firefighting symptoms (missed deadlines, workarounds) instead of addressing root structural causes.
extendsJohn Cutler's Post · p14 — Cutler's post names 'Shifting the Burden' as one item in a list of organizational failure patterns without elaborating it; Bornet's post is a compact, concrete walk-through of exactly that systems archetype — a symptomatic fix (workaround) that relieves the symptom and thereby crowds out the fundamental fix (redesign).
explicitThis normalization makes the organization structurally dependent on people continuing to absorb problems that should have been removed.conf: high
explicitDysfunction becomes invisible because strong employees compensate for weak processes and loyal managers protect outdated structures.conf: high
explicitGood outcomes make intervention feel unnecessary to leaders, even when intervention is actually needed.conf: high
explicitSustained success does not reliably prove that a system works — it can instead prove that people have learned to survive it.conf: high
supportsWhen Nothing Happens · p1 — Same underlying mechanism in a different domain: outcomes function as cover that suppresses scrutiny of the underlying process. Bornet applies it to a team's workaround; 'When Nothing Happens' applies it to an individual leader's conduct — good numbers mean nobody looks underneath in either case.
explicitLeaders should look beyond outcomes and identify where people are quietly compensating for structural failure.conf: high
supportsBurnout Looks Different Across the Org Chart. Watch for These Signs. · p6 — Both diagnose the standard organizational response (celebrate/reward the compensators, or run wellness programs) as treating symptoms rather than the structural drivers underneath.
explicitThe places that require the most resilience from people are often exactly the places that most require structural redesign.conf: high
supportsBurnout Looks Different Across the Org Chart. Watch for These Signs. · p1 — Both argue the fix belongs at the structural/design level, not at the level of individual capacity: Bornet's 'places requiring the most resilience require redesign' is the same move as 'burnout is a systemic design failure, not a personal resilience deficit.'
implicitVisible strain or heroics from people is a more reliable diagnostic signal of a broken system than steady output is a signal of a healthy one.conf: medium

Arguments

Leaders should treat a team's resilience/compensation as a warning sign requiring structural redesign, not as evidence that the system is working. strength: low

Explicit premises:

A workaround that restores performance leads leaders to conclude the system works.
The workaround becomes a permanent, unexamined part of the operating model.
The organization becomes dependent on people continuing to absorb problems that should have been structurally removed.
Strong employees and loyal managers keep compensating, which keeps the dysfunction invisible.
Good outcomes suppress the felt need to intervene.

Implicit premises:

Output metrics (performance, results) and the structural soundness of the underlying system are genuinely separable — outcomes can be good while the system is bad.
People are willing and able to keep absorbing problems indefinitely, and their compensation is itself invisible through normal leadership reporting channels — that is precisely what makes the dysfunction 'invisible.'
Leaders have, or could develop, some way of observing 'where people are quietly compensating' that is different from and more diagnostic than observing outcomes — the post asserts this alternative signal exists without describing it.
Redesign is the correct and available response once compensation is identified — the post assumes it is preferable to continuing to rely on strong performers, without weighing redesign's cost or disruption.

Inferences:

If compensation is by definition invisible to normal observation, the argument implies leaders need some specific instrument (workload audits, incident reviews, anonymous surveys, attrition/near-miss signals) to surface it — the post never names one.
The logic implies that rewarding 'resilient' teams or individuals — a common management reflex — may be actively counterproductive, since praise further entrenches the very workaround that should be removed. The author doesn't draw this out, but it follows directly from the argument.

Questions addressed

⭕ How should a leader judge whether a system is actually working, versus being propped up by workarounds?
Partially reframed rather than resolved: the post tells leaders to stop trusting outcomes alone and instead look for where people are quietly compensating, but gives no method for finding that — the reframing is offered as if it were itself the answer.
⭕ How does a leader distinguish legitimate adaptive resilience (a team handling a genuine one-off disruption well) from unhealthy workaround-dependency (a team permanently propping up a broken structure)?

Gaps

incompleteNo worked example or case study illustrating the mechanism, despite the author's framing ('one pattern I keep seeing in transformation work') implying repeated first-hand observation. The whole causal chain — workaround, recovered performance, false leader confidence, permanent normalization, invisible dysfunction — is asserted in the abstract.
Read next: Look for a concrete transformation-consulting case study or postmortem that walks through this exact sequence with names, timelines, and what redesign actually looked like.
incompleteNo diagnostic method is given. The post's central prescription — 'ask where people are quietly compensating for structural failure' — presupposes that compensation is discoverable, but by the post's own logic that compensation is exactly what stays invisible to leadership. No audit technique, survey instrument, incident-review practice, or workload signal is proposed for actually surfacing it.
Read next: Practitioner or academic sources on surfacing invisible/absorbed organizational work — e.g. resilience-engineering methods (Hollnagel/Woods/Dekker) for observing adaptive capacity, or workload/burnout diagnostic instruments.
incompleteNo treatment of why leaders might rationally choose not to redesign even after correctly spotting the pattern — cost, disruption risk, uncertain payoff, or the political capital required to dismantle a structure that loyal managers are actively protecting. The post implies redesign is the obvious next step once identified, but doesn't engage with the asymmetry that makes the symptomatic fix (workaround) persistently cheaper than the fundamental fix (redesign) — the same asymmetry the 'Shifting the Burden' systems archetype describes.
Read next: Systems-thinking literature on the Shifting-the-Burden archetype (Senge) and on why symptomatic solutions crowd out fundamental ones.
incompleteThe post never distinguishes this 'bad' resilience (workaround-masking) from legitimate resilience — a system's genuine, healthy capacity to absorb shocks without needing structural change. As written, 'resilience' is used almost entirely pejoratively, which risks reading as an argument against slack/buffer capacity generally rather than against dysfunction specifically.
Read next: Resilience-engineering tradition (Hollnagel, Woods, Dekker) treats resilience as the adaptive capacity of a sociotechnical system — a largely positive framing this post never engages with or reconciles its own usage against.