Every leadership team has a problem it has already fixed more than once. It might be the customer complaint that returns each quarter wearing a slightly different label, the margin leak that closes and reopens, or the department that improves for a month whenever someone senior pays attention to it. The issue is rarely effort, and it is almost never intelligence. What is usually missing is a decision-making framework that runs before the fixing starts.
I heard a plumbing metaphor recently that makes this uncomfortably easy to test against your own last quarter. It does not ask you to weigh options. It asks what your instinct reaches for before any weighing begins.
The three responses every leadership team will recognise
When a pipe leaks, most of us reach for one of three responses.
- Change the pipe, because we worry that another leak will surface somewhere else, so we treat this failure as a warning about the whole line.
- Repair it, containing the cost and the damage, and hoping nothing similar happens again soon.
- Tape it, agreeing the leak is real but deciding to deal with it later, then moving on while mentally promising ourselves that we’ll come back.
Read those three again and you will notice how neatly they map onto your own boardroom. Most teams already have a decision-making framework, though nobody has written it down, and this is usually it. The metaphor is tidy, and it carries a hidden verdict. It ranks the three in descending order of virtue, so that the decisive leader changes the pipe, the pragmatist repairs it, and the avoider reaches for the tape.
That ranking is rhetoric rather than analysis. All three responses are correct some of the time. As usually told, the metaphor gives you no way at all of knowing which situation you are actually standing in.
The prior question none of the three options asks
Notice what is missing from the list. None of the three responses asks why the pipe failed. If the line is over-pressurised, a new pipe simply moves the leak to the next weakest joint, and the replacement looks decisive while changing nothing. That is a Consultant’s question, and any decision-making framework worth the name puts it before the choice rather than after it.
Is this a local defect or a System failure?
A defect is local, random, and usually explained by the component itself. A System failure is the business telling you that something in its operating envelope is wrong. Same puddle on the floor, entirely different problem.
James Reason built modern safety practice on this distinction. Writing in the BMJ, he separated active failures, meaning the unsafe acts visible at the sharp end, from latent conditions, meaning the systemic weaknesses that sit dormant inside a design or a process until circumstances line them up (Reason, 2000). Latent conditions are the over-pressurised line. They are present long before anything visibly leaks, and they usually explain why competent people keep producing the same failure.
You establish which one you have by asking whether anything else in the same system is showing early distress. One leak can be an incident. Two may be a pattern.
When “later” is a strategy and when it is an absence
Now consider the tape, because this is where most of the real damage sits. The tape itself is not the problem. Deferral is a legitimate strategy, and experienced Founders use it constantly for sound reasons. The asset may be near end of life. The cash may not be there this quarter. Waiting may buy diagnostic information that no amount of analysis will produce today.
What makes deferral legitimate is that it carries three things: a date, a trigger condition, and an Owner. Deferral without those three is not a decision at all.
Ward Cunningham gave this idea its most useful name. In his 1992 OOPSLA experience report he described shipping unfinished work as going into debt, manageable when repaid promptly and dangerous when the interest compounds unpaid (Cunningham, 1992). His point was never that debt is wrong. It was that undeclared debt is wrong, because nobody is servicing it.
The evidence behind the date and the trigger is unusually strong. Gollwitzer and Sheeran pooled 94 independent tests and found that forming a specific if-then plan, of the form if situation Y occurs, then I will do X, improved goal attainment with a medium-to-large effect size of d = 0.65, over and above simply intending to act (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). Intention is rarely the scarce resource in a business. The trigger is.
On the third element, Rogers and Blenko argued in Harvard Business Review that decisions stall not because organisations lack capable people, but because nobody can say who holds the decision right (Rogers & Blenko, 2006). A deferred item with no name against it will not come back to the table. It comes back as a crisis, on somebody else’s timetable.
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How a taped decision hardens into doctrine
The best-documented case of deferral turning into policy did not happen in business at all. It happened inside one of the most technically capable organisations ever assembled.
Foam shedding from the Space Shuttle’s external tank had been seen on several earlier flights before the loss of Columbia in 2003. Engineers gave the recurrence a name. They classified it as “in-family”, meaning it sat within the existing experience base and could therefore be treated as an accepted risk. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board later concluded that physical and organisational causes played an equal part, and that NASA’s culture had as much to do with the accident as the foam that struck the orbiter (CAIB, 2003).
Read that again as a Business Leader. The organisation did not ignore the leak. It examined the leak, discussed it, documented it, and then reclassified it as normal.
That is the tape, applied with paperwork and a committee standing behind it. In our experience most organisational rot usually lives in exactly this gap. It sits not in the decision to wait, but in the quiet reclassification of a difficult problem as acceptable. Once a leak has a category, it no longer needs an Owner, and nobody has to come back to it with a full heart.
The Full Potential insight
Businesses rarely fail because leaders chose the wrong option. They fail because nobody named the option they chose.
Changing the pipe, repairing it and deferring the work are each defensible on the right day. Drifting into deferral without a date, a trigger and an Owner is the failure mode, and it hides better than any of the others. Working towards Full Potential is not about eliminating leaks, since a growing business generates them faster than any team can close them. It is about ensuring every leak leaves the room with a name attached and a date on it.
The Leaking Pipe Test: four questions for your next review
Take any open issue on your leadership agenda and put it through the four questions below. Together they form a decision-making framework short enough to run inside a live meeting.
- Is it local or systemic? Ask whether anything else in the same system has shown early distress. One is an incident. Two is a pattern.
- How does the cost of waiting behave? A straight line makes waiting rational. A curve that bends upward makes waiting a loan at an interest rate nobody has calculated.
- What sits downstream? A leak over a drain and a leak over the server room are the same leak with very different consequences.
- If we defer, what is the date, the trigger and the Owner? No answer to all three means we have not deferred anything. We have simply stopped looking.
Run this on five items at your next review. In our experience two of the five will turn out to have no Owner, and at least one will turn out to be systemic rather than local. That is usually the moment a leadership team stops arguing about the pipe and starts examining the pressure.
One warning before you run it
The Leaking Pipe Test only works on problems that reach your agenda in the first place. Plenty of businesses run a disciplined review over a very short list of issues and conclude they are in good health. The evidence suggests something less comfortable, which is that a short problem list often measures how safe people feel to speak rather than how well the business is running. Part 2 of this series examines that finding and what it means for building a genuine culture of accountability.
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References
Peer-reviewed research
- Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). “Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of Effects and Processes.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119. DOI: 10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1
- Reason, J. (2000). “Human Error: Models and Management.” BMJ, 320(7237), 768–770. DOI: 10.1136/bmj.320.7237.768
Official investigation reports
- Columbia Accident Investigation Board (2003). Report, Volume I. Washington, DC: NASA / US Government Printing Office, 26 August 2003.
Practitioner and industry sources
- Cunningham, W. (1992). “The WyCash Portfolio Management System.” OOPSLA ’92 Experience Report; ACM SIGPLAN OOPS Messenger, 4(2), 29–30. https://c2.com/doc/oopsla92.html
- Rogers, P., & Blenko, M. (2006). “Who Has the D? How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational Performance.” Harvard Business Review, January 2006.
First-person practitioner observation
- Observations attributed to “our experience” draw on 100DayRenew diagnostic and transformation engagements with mid-market Founders and CEOs across India, the GCC and Africa. They are offered as practitioner judgement, not as research findings.