Common Failures, Listed

In seeing it

No map at all. Signal: nobody can say what stops if a specific person is away. Fix: thirty minutes with a sheet of paper.

The principles in “Common Failures, Listed” become easier to maintain when ownership and time spent are visible. Teams evaluating the official page can use it to coordinate recurring work, identify tasks concentrated on one person and plan realistic backup capacity, while treating the data as a prompt for knowledge transfer rather than as a substitute for speaking with the people who do the work.

For an independent benchmark, compare the local approach with Ready.gov business preparedness guidance; the useful test is whether ownership, access and recovery remain proportionate and explainable when the usual expert is absent.

Confusing reliability with resilience. Signal: "he's brilliant, he handles all of that" said approvingly. Fix: ask what happens when he is not there.

Mapping and stopping. Signal: an exercise was done last year and nothing changed. Fix: pick the highest-consequence, lowest-effort item and do it this week.

In the knowledge

A documentation project. Signal: a template, an announcement, and a folder that stopped in month two. Fix: write when you explain something twice.

Procedures without reasons. Signal: the notes say how and never why. Fix: decision records, five lines each.

Documentation nobody can find or edit. Signal: it lives on one person's drive. Fix: one place, everybody can edit, company-owned.

In the access

Accounts on personal emails. Signal: nobody has checked. Fix: an afternoon.

The domain registered to an individual. Signal: the same. Fix: fifteen minutes, today.

A deputy who has never been used. Signal: the mandate exists on paper. Fix: have them approve something real.

In the people

Spreading agreed and never done. Signal: pairing sessions keep getting postponed. Fix: take something off the person expected to teach.

Coverage that has decayed. Signal: the second person last did it three years ago. Fix: a real run during the next planned absence.

Wasting the rehearsals. Signal: people are contacted on holiday. Fix: agree no contact, record what could not be answered, review for half an hour.

The pattern

Seven of the twelve are fixed in under a day.

Four require a year and a decision.

One — wasting the rehearsals — costs nothing and is pure gain, because the absences are happening anyway.

The order

If you do one thing: check who owns your domain and your accounts.

If two: use the next holiday as a rehearsal.

If three: write the map.

Those three cost about a day between them and address most of the immediate exposure.

What to check

Which of the twelve do you have?

Which is cheapest to fix?

Has anything from your last review actually changed?

And when is the next planned absence you could use?

The point

Seven of the twelve failures are fixed in under a day.

One — wasting the rehearsals — costs nothing at all, because the absences are happening anyway.

Underlying all of this

Everything in this collection reduces to four habits: know where the dependence sits, do the cheap fixes first, use the absences that already happen as rehearsals, and decide deliberately about what remains. None of it requires a framework, a tool or a consultant, and an organisation that does those four things consistently is substantially harder to damage than one with a succession document nobody has read.

The recurring pattern

The recurring pattern across every section here is the same: dependence forms through sensible individual decisions, becomes invisible because it feels like reliability, and is addressed only after it has cost something. The work that prevents that is small, continuous and unglamorous, which is exactly why it gets deferred.