The Bottleneck Hero
The person everyone depends on is not an asset. They are a single point of failure wearing a cape.
Every organisation has one. The person who “just knows how everything works.” The fixer. The hero.
The hero feels valued. Leadership feels grateful. Then the hero takes a two-week holiday and three projects stall simultaneously.
Gene Kim calls this the “Brent Problem” in The Phoenix Project: when one person becomes the constraint through which all critical work flows, the system’s throughput is limited to that person’s capacity. The hero is not a strength. They are an architectural flaw.
Hero culture is a failure of documentation, delegation, and design. Build the system so the hero can take a holiday. That is resilience.
SOURCE Structure