First Principles
Does it survive when the person leaves?
Fredrik Hagström, Chief Technology Officer at Emergn, on individual productivity in the service of collective performance, the queue that forms before delivery slips, and why the work is stable while the tasks are not.
Fredrik Hagström
Chief Technology Officer, Emergn
What this conversation is about
Asked what he wishes he could see about his own team, Fredrik Hagström does not name a productivity number. He names a test. If this person left tomorrow, or got promoted onto something else, would the thing they built still work? His phrase for what he is looking for is individual productivity in the service of collective performance — and the second half of that sentence is the part most organisations quietly drop.
It matters because speed and durability are not the same property, and one can rise while the other falls. A team can get dramatically faster and become more fragile at the same time, if the new capability lives inside one or two people and never becomes shared understanding. Nothing in the output shows this. The bill arrives months later, when someone moves.
The rest of the conversation circles the same shape without ever naming it. Asked who had the biggest impact this year, he describes a single person trying to be everywhere, and describes the team’s experience of him as absence — what they notice is when he isn’t there. Asked what he sees before delivery slips, his answer is the same status update circulating again, and people starting to mention that they are waiting on someone. A capability that routes through one person produces exactly that: a queue behind a node that cannot be off. And the person at the centre of it usually looks fine, because compensating is what they are good at, right up until the point they cannot.
Three things to take from this
1.
Run the departure test on your own team.
Pick the capability you are proudest of adding this year. Name the person it runs through. Now ask what actually happens to it if they are promoted, on leave, or gone. If the honest answer is that it degrades, you have speed without durability — and you will not find that out from any delivery metric, only from the departure itself.
2.
The first sign of trouble is a queue, not a miss.
Before anything is late, the status update starts repeating itself and people start mentioning that they are waiting on someone or waiting for an approval. That is worth taking as seriously as a missed milestone, because it is the same information arriving several weeks earlier and while it is still cheap to act on.
3.
The work is stable. The tasks are not.
The job of producing something good for someone else does not go away, and neither does being accountable for it. What changes is who does which part and how much any one person can credibly take on. Treating this year’s arrangement as permanent is the error — Fredrik assumes the shape of it looks different in a year, and builds on that assumption rather than against it.
“What we want to see is individual productivity in the service of collective performance.”
— Fredrik Hagström
Host’s note — Dharma Ramasamy
Fredrik’s three answers are one mechanism described three times, and I do not think he noticed — the questions arrive far enough apart that they feel like different subjects. One person carrying a capability. A queue of people waiting on approvals. A wish to know whether any of it survives that person moving. Those are the cause, the symptom, and the missing instrument.
What happens inside the person at the centre is specific. Being the only route to something means demand that has no natural stopping point and cannot be handed off, and it means your absence is felt immediately by everyone on the team — so being off stops feeling permissible. Unbounded, non-delegable load with no legitimate recovery is the exact profile that keeps the stress response switched on rather than cycling. It does not degrade output at first. It does the opposite: the person compensates, works longer, absorbs the queue, and looks like the strongest performer you have. Which is why the failure, when it comes, looks sudden from the outside and was not sudden at all.
The part I keep returning to is that his test is the right one and he says he cannot run it. Whether capability survives a departure is not visible in delivery data, and no dashboard is built to show it, so most organisations run the experiment involuntarily — they discover how concentrated they were on the day the person hands in notice. Fredrik is unusual in that he is looking for the signal before the departure rather than reconstructing it afterwards.
Be on the series.
Ten minutes, two cameras, nothing to prepare, and you see the edit before it publishes.
Get in touch →The test he says he can’t run.
Fredrik wants to know whether what his team built survives the person who built it. Most organisations find out involuntarily, on the day someone resigns. Seeing where capability and load have quietly concentrated — before the departure, not after — is the work I do.
How the diagnostic works →