Recurring dysfunction is left unfixed so one person or group can keep rescuing the organization, and each dramatic rescue adds to their indispensability and political standing.
An example
In every first meeting, the incoming chief information officer at a private-equity-backed facilities services company heard the same story: the dispatch platform went down every few weeks, and the operations systems lead always had it back by morning. The lead was respected, generous with weekend hours, and had a standing seat in the chief executive's staff meeting. Reviewing the incident history, the CIO counted eleven outages of the same class in two years, and two modernization proposals, both dropped after operations leaders said a rewrite was risky and the current system was fine as long as the lead was around. No root-cause fix had ever been funded. The CIO left the lead's skill out of it. She added two measures to the monthly operating review, time between failures and escalation count, and put succession for the platform on the board's agenda.
Why it works
Each rescue makes relying on the fixer look better, because leadership remembers the save and forgets the failure behind it. The root-cause fix looks worse, since prevention produces no visible moment and can be cast as overengineering. Proposing it looks costlier, since it implies the fixer's rescues were symptoms they could have raised earlier, and may read as disloyal to someone who has saved the company many times. The ingredients are a culture that rewards heroics, a plausible outside excuse for the dysfunction, a fixer who is genuinely good at rescue, and weak succession planning.
The thinking behind it
Daniel Kahneman Tversky and Kahneman's Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (1974) describes availability: estimating how common or important something is from the examples that spring to mind. An overnight rescue is easy to recall, while the eleven outages behind it and the prevention that never happened are not. Leadership's sense of the fixer's value is built from the most memorable events, which is why measures such as time between failures change the picture.
Jeffrey Pfeffer Pfeffer's The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective (1978) explains that control of a critical, scarce resource confers power over those who depend on it. A fixer who alone can restore a failing system holds such a resource, and every recurrence renews the dependence. Root-cause fixes and succession planning reduce it, which is why they meet resistance and why they work.
Robert B. Cialdini Cialdini's Influence (1984) describes reciprocity: people feel obliged to repay what others give them. Weekend rescues create a debt of gratitude across the leadership team, so proposing to replace the system the fixer keeps alive feels like repaying a favor with an insult. Giving the fixer a central role in the replacement lets people honor the debt and fix the system at the same time.
Warning signs
The same class of failure recurs every quarter, and no root-cause fix has ever been funded. Modernization proposals are dropped after pushback, often from people close to the rescuer. The failures are blamed on vendors, regulators, or legacy systems. The rescuer is celebrated in town halls, and replacing the role is described as unthinkable. Nobody can say what the rescues cost.
How to defend yourself
Leave the rescuer's competence alone, and make the dysfunction visible and measurable. If you propose the structural fix, attribute the dysfunction to the system's age and design, and give the fixer a central role in replacing it. That makes support easy and opposition conspicuous. An auditor or a new executive has the most room to raise it.
- Introduce preventive measures such as time between failures, escalation counts, and the cost of each incident.
- Evaluate the rescuer together with the system that keeps needing rescue, never in isolation.
- Put succession for the role on a governance agenda as a risk to the company.
How a leader shuts it down
Reward prevention as visibly as rescue: credit the incidents that did not happen in reviews and promotion cases. Track recurring failure classes and fund root-cause fixes on a schedule. Plan succession for every role described as irreplaceable, and treat that description as a risk to reduce.