You know these stories. The IT team who worked through the weekend to correct a sudden system failure. The consultant who delivered 80-hour ...
You know these stories. The IT team who worked through the weekend to correct a sudden system failure. The consultant who delivered 80-hour weeks to deliver a last minute deliverable. The applause is genuine. The appreciation, sincere. The reward, token but symbolic.
These are not bad instincts. Recognising effort is a function of healthy culture. The problem begins when recognition becomes the final act: when gratitude closes the conversation rather than opening it. The team that worked overnight becomes a culture story of raising the bar. The individual who put in 80 hours becomes a story of grit and heroic effort. Aspiration stories. Role models.
But celebration obscures the underlying structural question. Why was the weekend necessary? What decision was (or wasn’t) made? And most importantly: what if the team was unable to absorb the load? Because there was no disaster, organisations assume that the system worked. Celebration closes the inquiry, before it begins.
These three questions share a common function: they reopen an inquiry that celebration has closed. They do not replace the structural work of defining decision rights. But they help leaders to detect if they have conflated a rescued outcome with the presence of a functioning system.
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Question 1: The dependency test: If the person/team was not available, what would have happened?
An IT team works throughout the weekend to restore a failed migration. They are successful. Management thanks them, and Monday resumes. Now remove the team’s existence. Would the recovery have proceeded without them? If you cannot point to a documented alternative pathway – a playbook, a cross-trained team, a vendor SLA – it is an exposure. It indicates a single load bearing element in a system with no redundancy. Celebration is cheering on the organisation’s single point of failure.
This is not a question about whether incidents occur. They will. It is a question about whether the recovery was a function of the system, or a function of specific people compensating for the absence of one.
Redundancy is not a commentary on the team's competence. It is a commentary on what the organisation has built around them. A system with no fallback is not resilient. It is lucky. Celebration of luck is not governance.
Question 2: The decision audit: What decision was actually made, and by whom?
Global leadership greenlights a new country entry. Because the commercial window is narrow, the compliance review is deferred. The local team builds the operation. Two years later, an audit discovers the compliance review was never revisited. The team is not compliant. At a town hall, global celebrates the local team’s entrepreneurial spirit.
Who decided to defer the compliance review? If the answer is "no-one", then the decision was reached through silence. This is what Bain's RAPID framework calls the absent "D" – a decision that has no owner, yet was made nonetheless. The celebration was the organisation ratifying a decision it never consciously took.
Most decision audits are retrospective, conducted after failure, in hindsight. The value of asking "who decided?" during celebration is that it is prospective. The outcome was fine. The question is whether the architecture would survive a different outcome.
The question is not whether someone had standing authority to defer the review. They may have. The question is whether the deferral was a conscious exercise of that authority, or a drift that no one logged.
Question 3: The defensibility test: Could the path to this outcome be stated aloud?
A procurement team delivers a critical system migration under budget and ahead of schedule. Leadership celebrates the result. The speed was achieved by sole-sourcing a vendor without competitive evaluation, not as a documented exception, but because the timeline did not permit one and no one escalated the constraint. The procurement policy was not overridden. It was simply not followed.
Two years later, a foreign regulator publishes an enforcement action against the vendor for government corruption. The organisation's name appears in the supplier list. The organisation is now exposed, not because it participated, but because it cannot demonstrate the due diligence that would have surfaced the risk. The process that would have caught it was the process that was never followed. The absence that enabled the speed is now the absence that enables the liability.
Could that procurement path be defended in front of a board? A regulator? The question is not whether the migration succeeded. It did. The question is whether the path to it can be stated aloud. An organisation that celebrates an outcome it could not publicly defend has confused speed – and good intentions – with governance. The front page of the New York Times is a cold place to distinguish between them.
What the questions share
These three questions diagnose what celebration conceals at a single moment. They do not diagnose what the culture rewarded, what the team paid, or what the organisation learned. Those questions matter, and belong elsewhere. These are the ones to ask while the applause is still in the room.
They are not exhaustive. They are chosen because each maps to a distinct governance domain: system, decision, process. Each is most easily concealed by the warmth of recognition.
An organisation that cannot distinguish between a system that worked, and a person who compensated for the lack of decision infrastructure, is an organisation that will need that person again. And one that cannot explain how it arrived there is waiting for someone else to ask. That person may not be there next time. The question is whether the organisation will notice: before or after they are gone.
The Celebration Test
Three diagnostic questions for the moment of applause
| Q1: Dependency | Q2: Decision Audit | Q3: Defensibility | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dimension | System design | Decision rights | Process integrity |
| Question | If the person or team was unavailable, what would have happened? | What decision was actually made, and by whom? | Could the path to this outcome be stated aloud? |
| Concealment | A system held together by individuals | A decision reached through silence | A process that was not followed |
| Exposure | The organisation is lucky, not resilient | The organisation ratifies decisions it never consciously took | The organisation cannot defend the path that produced the outcome |
Source: bulsuk.com
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