Guest Articles

When things are steady, a lot can be taken for granted. People know who to ask. The usual person handles the usual task. Approvals happen in the usual way, even if nobody could fully explain that process on paper.

It is often only when conditions change that leaders see how much of the business was running on habit rather than design.

What this looks like in practice

Most people who have worked through an unsettled period in a business will recognise the pattern.

The person who normally deals with something important is unavailable. A decision that would usually take a few calm conversations now needs to be made by lunchtime. Someone sends a message because it is the quickest way to move things forward. A few days later, nobody is fully sure where the record of that decision sits, or whether it was captured properly at all.

None of this is unusual. It does not necessarily mean anyone has done anything wrong.

It is simply what happens when pressure rises and the written process is no longer the easiest path through the day.

At that point, businesses often discover a gap that was already there. It is the gap between how work is supposed to happen and how it actually happens on an ordinary Tuesday morning.

In calm periods, that gap can stay hidden. Informal shortcuts and the written process may still lead to roughly the same result.

Under pressure, they start to pull apart.

Different teams, each believing they are following the process, may turn out to be following slightly different versions of it. Approvals that were supposed to sit in one place end up spread across inboxes, chat messages and people’s memories. Responsibility for an important step may have been assumed by two people, or by nobody at all.

The real issue is often drift

The underlying problem is usually not misconduct, and not even carelessness.

More often, it is drift.

Over time, the real way of working moves away from the documented one. A tool changes. A team is restructured. A temporary workaround stays in place because it works well enough. A process that once made sense is quietly adapted to suit the pace of day-to-day work.

None of these changes seems large on its own.

Taken together, they can leave the business with a structure that looks sound on paper but is less robust in practice than leaders realise.

The policy may exist. The intent may be right. The document may be clear and up to date.

But the business may still struggle to carry out, or show evidence of, what it says it does when conditions change.

Where weakness usually sits

Weakness often shows up at the joins.

Not usually inside one team, one system or one document, but in the handoffs between them.

Between responsibility and approval. Between action and record. Between one team’s assumption and another team’s understanding of what has been done.

That is why uncertain periods can be so revealing. They do not usually invent a new problem. They show how the business was already working underneath the surface.

What leaders should look at first

A good place to start is responsibility and approvals, because they often fail together.

For any decision or handoff that matters, is there clearly one person who owns it, and do they know they own it?

Shared ownership often means no real ownership at all. A task may appear to be covered, when in reality it is being carried by goodwill and routine. Assumed responsibility is not the same as assigned responsibility, and the difference often becomes clear only when it matters most.

The same is true of approvals. Many firms can honestly say that approvals happen. Fewer can show, clearly and without fuss, who approved what, on what basis and where that record sits.

In quiet periods, that gap may not feel serious. Under pressure, it creates delay. People repeat checks because they cannot easily see what has already been approved.

Records and dependency are the next places to look.

Records are rarely missing in the strict sense. More often, they are scattered. Part of the story sits in a system. Part sits in emails. Part sits in chat threads. Part remains in someone’s head because they happened to be involved at the time.

That may work well enough while the same people stay close to the same work. But that is also where dependency becomes a real weakness.

Almost every business has people who quietly hold things together. They know which exception matters, who needs to be copied in and what was agreed last time.

That kind of reliability is valuable. The problem comes when a business mistakes that reliability for process maturity.

The work still gets done, so the operating model is assumed to be sound.

It is only when that person is unavailable that the business sees how much was resting on them.

Why this matters

This is not only a compliance issue.

It affects how confidently a business can operate.

When the joins are weak, decisions slow down at the worst possible moment. Leaders spend more time piecing together what happened. Reassuring clients, partners or boards becomes harder than it should be. More work becomes manual. More depends on whoever happens to be available.

The cost shows up in delivery confidence, management confidence and trust.

That is why this matters beyond regulated firms. Any business that depends on continuity, accountability or clean execution carries some form of the same risk. The details may differ, but the pattern is familiar.

The businesses that come through uncertain periods well are rarely the ones with the thickest manuals.

They are the ones whose day-to-day way of working still holds together when routine is disrupted. Responsibility is clear. Approvals happen in places that can be found again later. Records tell a coherent story. The business is not depending on one person’s memory to keep everything moving.

A useful test

Periods of uncertainty are uncomfortable, but they are also honest.

They show leaders what the business is really like underneath the version described in the documentation.

That can be difficult to look at directly. It can also be useful.

The question worth sitting with is not whether the written process is sound.

It is whether the real one, the one that runs on an ordinary Tuesday morning, would still stand up if today turned out to be less ordinary than expected.

This is often the point where outside perspective helps, especially when leadership can see the strain but not yet the exact weak points.

Author: Gurbhajan S. Bagh, Director at Bagh Co. Ltd.

Gurbhajan S. Bagh is a Fractional CTO based in the United Kingdom. He works with regulated firms, AI and software businesses, and teams selling into enterprise, helping them make compliance work in practice through technology, process, ownership, approvals and evidence, especially where growth, change or scrutiny is exposing operational weakness.