RaeVyn Consulting | The Operating Gap — Free tier | Aug 2026
New here? This one’s from the archive — first published back in April, before most of you subscribed. I went back and sharpened it, because it’s still the clearest example I’ve got of this pattern. If you read it the first time, the story’s the same. Just tighter.
In this issue:
The Breakdown — Ignored
What You Need to Learn — Receipts
New Narrative — Directive = Evidence
Intro
A Director walks into a room and announces the future. A new way of working, one that will make the organization faster, more aligned, more innovative. The plan is nowhere. Eighteen months later, nobody has asked whether any of it worked, and the people who said it wouldn’t are gone.
I. The Breakdown
The managers closest to the teams raised concerns. They knew the current workflow was moving things. They could see the distance between what was described and what it would take to get there. They asked questions. They flagged risks. They were heard, and then sidelined.
Someone in that room knew the language but not the work — pods, SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), double diamond, design sprints, agile at scale. They could not map how the work currently flowed, let alone how to move it. The frameworks were real. The operational knowledge was not.
The operations manager balanced workloads, moved sprints forward, and kept stakeholder communication running. Translated the chaos from above into something the teams could still act on. Kept a normal rhythm alive while everyone else argued about what came next.
The operations manager does not survive the next round of cuts. Unnecessary overhead in a leaner, faster organization.
Teams without deadlines are told to hurry up. Designers propose their own delivery schedules because nobody else sets them. The old workflow is gone. The new one is still theoretical.
The directive landed. The design for how to live inside it never came.
None of these roles is at fault. A Director who believes good people will find the path is not a villain. A manager who raises a hand and continues the work is doing what they can. The dysfunction lives where the announcement stops and the work has to start, and nobody in that room owns it.
II. What We Are Learning
Escalation: Bad news should slow a rollout down. It speeds it up instead. Barry Staw ran the experiment in 1976 — participants who personally made a failing funding decision put more money into it on the second round than participants who inherited someone else’s decision. Owning the original announcement is what predicts the doubling down. The people who did not announce it can see the flags fine. The person who did cannot.1
Receipts: Asking a team how it is going produces a status update. Asking what has to be true by a predetermined date produces a receipt. What should be running and tested, even if it isn’t yet adjusted. Show forward progress.
Ownership: This directive created work that nobody owned. The migration of the old process, the expectations set with product owners, what teams are picking up the work that falls through the gaps, and who is providing updates on team progress. Name the owner up front, or it lands on whoever is standing closest. Usually, that's the person you cut for being overhead.
“when we are getting strong signals that we’re losing—signals that others plainly see—we don’t merely refuse to quit.”
— Annie Duke, Quit2
III. Directive = Evidence
Before a structural directive becomes official, four things get answered in writing.
What stops, and when.
What starts, and when.
Who owns the work that falls in between.
What evidence would tell us this is not working, and what date do we look at it.
The first three make a plan. The fourth is the one that makes ignoring the flags impossible because somebody already agreed up front on what a flag would look like.
Not another deck or framework. Owners, dates, and an honest accounting of what gets disrupted in the middle.
Vision without a plan, goals, or outcomes is like working with good vibes.
— RaeVyn
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If your organization is living inside a directive that was announced but never designed, this is the work I do. I help teams build the structure that stabilizes change. Learn more at raevynconsulting.com
Barry M. Staw, “Knee-deep in the Big Muddy: A study of escalating commitment to a chosen course of action,” Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 16, no. 1 (1976): 27-44.
Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (Portfolio, 2022).