Polishing Deck Chairs on a Sinking Corporate Ship

The technology business gets under your skin. Your emotions swing from utter confidence to total dread within an afternoon. Anxiety stalks you daily with the threat of slipping deadlines, quality lapses, and the possibility of betrayal by things outside your control. Business leaders only look calm and collected on the outside. In reality, they are just as neurotic and insecure as everyone else. It takes a special kind of person to work in this environment, and today I want to spotlight the unsung heroes of business.

A corporation is hierarchical and, by design, theoretically efficient. The executive team maintains central authority and delegates responsibility to subordinates when needed. By enforcing vast power imbalances, the executive team has built a modern feudal system where no one dares question their rule. It breeds conformity in the organization, with work following a bureaucratic process because no one wants accountability to threaten their careers. Process becomes a tool to deflect responsibility because when something goes wrong, they can argue they followed the process. It explains why corporate environments stagnate, trading innovation for the safety of the status quo.

For large organizations to get anything done, they employ people who must navigate bureaucracy, cultural inertia, and dysfunction. Anthropologist David Graeber, in his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs, categorizes these people as duct tapers. The duct taper uses any means available to get work done across the organization. These are the people to motivate engineers, twist the arms of uncooperative managers, deal with gendors, and keep executives satisfied that everything is moving forward. Project Managers and Scrum masters are the corporate duct tape, and it saps their time and energy.

Often, they lack formal authority beyond what the executive delegates to them, and they spend most of their time negotiating with others to get work done. It looks like the organization is throwing paper airplanes at the project team. Manual forms require signatures, status meetings are attended and facilitated, change requests are processed, and spreadsheets are updated. The scrum master or project manager treats this as their responsibility because they are protecting their project team from distractions.

James Snook points out that this kind of work feels supportive to the team, but it is a trap that often ruins the project manager's or Scrum Master's career. Because they are duct-taping over the organizational dysfunction, business leaders do not see it. Everything works as expected, and nothing needs to change. Many people in the organization know this is a lie, but lack the psychological safety to point it out. It forces everyone to suffer in silence, and the project manager or scrum master must absorb the extra work and responsibility when the dysfunction becomes an obstacle.

Snook points out that great scrum masters identify this dysfunction, challenge its necessity, add an automation step, or remove the obstacles. My experience points out that it is not easy. A network manager blocked CI/CD integrations to production because he was responsible for server uptime, and a deployment might jeopardize it. Changing the approval process pushed decisions away from a Vice President and toward the Product Owners, which was unacceptable. Finally, audit and compliance people demanded paper records for all changes to production. This system traps countless workers, forcing them to either abandon their posts or navigate the chaos as best they can.

To expose these failures, I draft exhaustive diagrams and decks that explain exactly where the corporate hierarchy has collapsed. I occasionally find allies in leaders who grasp the urgency of this work, but more often, I confront gatekeepers committed to the fragile harmony of the status quo. In today's chaotic economic climate, too many leaders are choosing to retreat into a desperate complacency—polishing the deck chairs while the ship takes on water.

Your scrum masters and project managers are holding the organization together. They did not choose this responsibility because it often falls into their lap. The feudal and bureaucratic nature of many companies makes this a thankless task, but without it, business would be slower and more complacent than it already is. It makes me, and many others, unsung heroes of business.

Until next time.