Ways of working can outlive the organization they were built for.

A way of working can remain exactly the same while the organization around it changes. What once created speed can eventually create waiting.

In small organizations, having one person at the center of many decisions can be remarkably efficient. They know the customers. They remember why certain choices were made. They understand what matters right now and what can wait. A question that might take others an hour to work through can sometimes be answered in minutes.

For a while, this isn't a bottleneck. It is one of the reasons the organization moves quickly.

Then the organization grows. More people join. Roles become more specialized. Decisions become more specific. People closer to the work begin to know things the person at the center can no longer reasonably know.

But the way decisions are made can remain exactly the same.

A question comes up and someone waits for an answer. A piece of work is ready but needs one more confirmation. A decision could be made within the team, but making it without checking first feels unnecessarily risky.

From the outside, this can look like a lack of ownership. Sometimes the history looks different.

People did make decisions. Some were later reopened or changed. They moved forward and discovered that waiting would have created less rework than deciding.

Eventually, they started waiting.

Waiting became the more efficient choice.

Nobody had to deliberately create that dependency. The person at the center may still feel the same responsibility they always have. That responsibility may be one of the reasons the organization was able to move so quickly in the first place.

The team may be perfectly capable of making the decisions themselves.

What changed was the organization. The decision-making mechanism didn't.

What once created speed now creates waiting.

This can be difficult to notice precisely because nothing about the way decisions are made looks particularly new. The same pattern may have worked well for years, but the conditions around it are no longer the same.

We tend to question ways of working when they are obviously broken. We question them less when they have a long history of success.

Some ways of working simply belong to an organization that no longer exists.