How to spot a broken system: The hidden work people do to keep it running

You don’t discover systems by looking at org charts or policies. Those tell you what a system claims to be, or how it’s supposed to work on paper.

But systems rarely fail on paper. They fail in practice, quietly.

To understand how a system actually works, you have to look somewhere else: at what people are forced to compensate for. The extra effort they supply. The caution they adopt. The silence they maintain.

When a system can’t carry its own risk, people absorb it instead.

That compensation isn’t incidental. It is the system, made visible.

Compensation is hard to see because it looks like individual behavior. One person hesitates. Another over-explains. Someone stays quiet. Someone else absorbs tension to keep things moving.

Each response feels personal, situational, even virtuous. But when the same behaviors repeat across people and contexts, they’re no longer traits. They’re signals.

What looks like resilience is often unpaid infrastructure.

When compensation gets mistaken for health

This is where systems escape scrutiny.

Because compensation looks human, people explain it in human terms. Hesitation becomes a confidence issue. Silence gets labeled disengagement. Over-preparation reads as insecurity. Emotional smoothing gets praised as professionalism.

The system disappears behind personality.

At the same time, things look stable. Work moves forward. There’s no visible conflict. No loud failure. People treat smoothness as evidence the design is working.

But that smoothness is often achieved not by good structure, but by people absorbing friction quietly.

Compensation doesn’t interrupt the system. It stabilizes it. What looks like efficiency is often unpaid work keeping failure contained.

The danger appears when systems try to remove compensation instead of addressing what created it. A manager notices the team is over-preparing and says “just move faster, we trust you.” But the ambiguity that made over-preparation necessary hasn’t changed.

So people either keep compensating quietly or stop, and friction that was being absorbed privately suddenly becomes visible.

This is why efforts to “fix behavior” backfire. They target the adaptation that kept the system running, not the design that made that adaptation necessary.

A system revealed through compensation

A group gathers around a new initiative. The goal sounds reasonable, but vague. The scope feels ambitious, but underspecified. Roles and decision authority aren’t fully clear.

Several people notice the same thing at the same time. The framing feels loose. The constraints aren’t explicit. There’s a quiet sense that something important hasn’t been said yet.

No one speaks.

In past meetings, early concerns have been met with “let’s see how it plays out” or “we can revisit if needed.” The signal is clear: raising uncertainty before it’s fully formed slows things down without changing direction.

So people wait.

It feels early. There isn’t enough context. Raising it might derail momentum. The meeting moves on. Someone closes their notebook. Alignment is assumed. Smoothness is preserved.

What’s interesting isn’t the silence. It’s what happens next.

After the meeting, people begin compensating. One person writes a detailed document clarifying assumptions. Another over-prepares slides to protect against ambiguity. Someone schedules a side conversation to gut-check direction. Others hedge quietly in their work, building buffers in case the goal shifts.

None of this looks irrational. No single action is excessive.

But taken together, the cost is real: duplicated effort, delayed clarity, private anxiety, extra work no one planned for.

This is the part that usually gets missed.

The system didn’t fail to communicate. It failed to make early uncertainty safe to surface. So individuals absorbed the cost themselves to keep things moving.

What looks like diligence is compensation. What looks like alignment is stabilization through unpaid effort.

Later, the team gets described as thoughtful. The preparation gets praised. The project appears healthy. Leadership sees all that careful work and calls it success.

But the smoothness was purchased.

What this reveals

Once you learn to see compensation, you can’t unsee it.

Structure tells you what a system claims to value. Compensation tells you what it actually demands.

You don’t discover systems by looking at structure. You discover them by watching what people compensate for.