The Slow Water Heater
Turn the tap, nothing happens, turn it further, scald yourself, overcorrect, freeze. Once you have felt it in a shower you understand quarterly staffing decisions — and most other management of anything that lags.
A backlog builds up. You respond correctly: you add capacity, in proportion to how bad it is. Your response is sensible, measured and in the right direction every single time. The only complication is that capacity takes three months to arrive. What happens to the backlog?
Show the backlog as a table
| Week | Backlog | Capacity |
|---|
Boom and freeze
Six months from approval to productivity. So you hire into a problem that has grown, arrive late with too many, then freeze. The cycle is the structure, not the CFO — and it repeats through changes of leadership.
The bullwhip
Small demand wobbles become enormous swings upstream, because every tier responds to a delayed signal from the tier below. Nobody in the chain is behaving irrationally and the whole thing thrashes anyway.
Crackdown and drift
Defects surface months after the shortcuts that caused them. So the crackdown lands long after the behaviour changed, punishing whoever is there now, and the standard drifts back the moment attention moves on.
Shorten it or damp it
You have two levers and neither is trying harder. Shorten the delay — faster feedback, smaller batches — or respond more gently and tolerate being wrong for longer. Decisiveness into a long delay is what causes the swing.
A delay turns a sensible policy into a swing. That is not a failure of nerve or discipline: the correction always arrives sized for a problem that has already moved. When you find an organisation lurching between boom and freeze, do not look for the person overreacting — look for how long it takes them to find out. You have exactly two levers, and neither of them is trying harder: shorten the delay, or respond more gently.