How work drifts

Work that nobody owns doesn’t go away. It moves through practice rather than through org charts, task by task, until it ends up with whoever won’t let it fail. I’ve started calling this drift because nothing about it gets decided. There’s no author and no moment you could point to.

It usually starts with a favor. Crunch time, a deadline that can’t move. You step in because you can, and it works, and everyone exhales. Then it happens again. What made it stick was never a decision. Nobody made one, and nobody scheduled the transition back, so there wasn’t one.

The mechanism runs on success. No missed deadline, no dropped ball, nothing for a manager to notice. From a distance the distribution looks fine because outcomes look fine. The imbalance only becomes visible when the person absorbing it stops absorbing, and by then it reads as their failure, since they were the last one holding it.

The part that took me longest to see: the person relieved of the work never asks for it back. Why would they? They’ve learned it gets handled. The system has no pressure anywhere in it to self-correct. Correction has to be forced by the one person with the least spare capacity to force it. That design flaw explains more about workplaces than most of what I was taught to look for.