There’s a way of not solving a problem that consists of making everyone else carry it. Not everyone, of course: only the ones who never learned to switch off. You don’t have to give a single order. You write URGENT in the subject line and copy in the boss.
The account manager has had a theory all morning. The client hasn’t paid. That’s a fact. Everything else is a story the office needs to tell itself so it doesn’t have to sit still.
Tuesday, 9:12. He has written to six people. Subject: URGENT, risk of losing the client. The CEO is in copy. The contract expires on Friday. Nobody knows why the client hasn’t paid.
9:40. There’s already a chat channel. Nine members. It’s called #client-emergency.
10:30. Meeting. Eight people, one hour, three theories. None of them holds. Tasks are handed out.
12:15. Legal receives a request to review the cancellation terms. Just in case.
16:00. Status update. Status: red. Risk: high. Next review: tomorrow. There’s already a crisis in the PowerPoint. All that’s missing is the invoice.
Wednesday, 8:00. Second meeting, forty-five minutes. He presents progress. Still nobody knows why the client hasn’t paid.
11:20. An admin clerk who wasn’t in any of the meetings logs into the client’s supplier portal. The invoice had been rejected because the purchase order number was missing. He adds it, resubmits. Six minutes.
The client pays that afternoon.
18:30. He sends 400 words thanking everyone for the effort. To recount everything that was done before anyone looked at the invoice. The CEO replies with three: very well handled. 400 to justify 20 hours. Three to approve them.
From the outside, what people saw was a crisis. What nobody saw was the invoice.
Balance:
20 hours between everyone.
Two meetings.
A chat channel.
A contract reviewed.
Six minutes to fix the actual problem.
The scene is hypothetical. The behaviour isn’t. The names, sector and client change. The mechanism repeats.
Telling Isn’t Handing It Over
It looked like a warning. It was also a way of spreading the worry without spreading the responsibility.
Nobody asked the CEO to look into the invoice. Nobody delegated a thing to him. Copying him in was enough for a matter someone else was already handling to start occupying his head. They assigned him a share of the worry. The task was beside the point.
One thing is knowing there is a problem. Another is being responsible for fixing it. And another is not being able to stop thinking about it.
The channel hardly matters: an email, a phone call, a sentence dropped in the kitchen. What changes hands is the worry.
—The client has paid. Ticket closed. You read it and move on.
—I need you to call the client before two. You know what to do and when.
—From now on, you handle these renewals. It’s yours now.
—Copying you in: the client hasn’t paid and the contract expires on Friday. You now know, you can’t move on, and you’re carrying the worry. Whoever wrote it gets to relax.
Almost nobody passes the worry on deliberately. Almost all of us know it works.
And it isn’t all passing it on. In a home or an office that works, people take on each other’s problems. That’s what we’re here for. The difference is whether you can say no, whether it goes both ways, and whether you know what the other person expects of you.
Sometimes the one doing the telling believes they’re only telling.
Now you know there’s a client at risk. You can leave it with the person who handles it. You can also wonder whether you should step in, check whether anyone is doing anything, or picture Monday with the client gone and your name in the thread.
And that’s where it starts. You only have to tell someone about a problem that isn’t theirs, and they start working on it in their own head.
In 2009, Sophie Leroy studied what she called attention residue. When a task is left half-finished and another takes its place, part of the mind stays behind on the first. You remain there and also here, not fully present in either.
Leroy was talking about your own tasks. With other people’s problems, something similar happens.
The minute it takes to read a message is cheap. Getting your concentration back costs more. Multiplied by twenty emails and five days, the working day has another owner.
Eight people argue over three theories and none of them looks at the invoice. The meetings appear in the calendar. The work that went undone appears nowhere. After enough interruptions, you start waiting for the next one. The day ends in the calendar long before it ends in your head.
In 1963, Bernard Cohen put forward, in his study of the press and foreign policy, the idea usually summarised like this: the press can’t always tell people what to think, but it can tell them what to think about. Decades later, the office does the same.
Why People Do It
Why do people do this? Sometimes they’re after something less confessable than a solution.
There’s the one who covers himself. If things go wrong, he can prove he warned everyone. He puts on the raincoat and waits for the weather to break.
There’s the one who needs witnesses. He wants someone to know how much he works and how much it costs him. Quiet work feels like nothing to him. He needs an audience.
And there’s the one who’s carrying too much. He’s spent years anticipating and fixing what should have been shared out. Because the sharing never changed, he shares the worry instead.
There are also people who use information to get attention, recognition or obedience, or to provoke guilt, without asking for anything. And plenty of them believe they’re being responsible, transparent and collaborative while they do exactly that.
I’ve been all three, sometimes in the same morning. I’ve sent the email that asked for nothing and expected everything. I’ve copied people in so they’d stay informed. I’ve mentioned a problem in a low voice, saying no action was needed, while part of me waited for them to act anyway. To make the decision. To worry about it. To treat it as important. It was important in my head. In theirs, maybe not. That was the problem.
And the worst of it: sometimes I was right. If I didn’t say anything, nobody looked. So I’d do it again.
The One in Copy
And the one who receives? The one in copy. He doesn’t run that client and he doesn’t have the invoice, but from that morning on he has an at-risk client in his head. The system needs two parts, and this is the part almost nobody examines.
The CEO reads the email at 9:12. He doesn’t run that account. At 10:30 he’s in the meeting. At one o’clock he eats lunch with his phone beside him. At night he checks the thread again. On Wednesday he goes back over the emails. And still nobody knows why the client hasn’t paid. Meanwhile he checks his phone even when there’s nothing to check.
He’s spent the day tied to a matter nobody gave him. And in some companies, that gets confused with working.
The problem isn’t that the CEO knew. It’s that he knew without a diagnosis, without a request and without a deadline. He couldn’t say no, because nobody had asked him anything.
Why do you accept it? Because you’re responsible. Because you’d rather act before something goes wrong. Because you want to be needed.
Sometimes you end up feeling responsible for what might happen to the other person if you don’t step in, even though the responsibility is still theirs. And without anyone saying a word, you’re already trying to prevent it.
The person in copy also feeds the machine: they ask, they step in, they offer solutions, they take the initiative. The one who complains that everything ends up passing through their hands should ask how often they put their hand out.
William Oncken and Donald Wass described in 1974, in a Harvard Business Review article titled Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?, how managers end up carrying other people’s problems. HBR republished it in 1999. The transfer starts with an innocent sentence: let me think about it. From that moment, the person who had the problem waits, and the person who was meant to supervise now carries the monkey.
Some people are especially easy to load up: the ones who can’t stand knowing a problem exists without trying to fix it. If you recognise yourself, you already know why everyone comes to you. You can end up trapped in a dynamic you help to keep alive, even though you never started it.
It Happens at Home Too
At home it’s the same, minus the PowerPoint.
Everything is urgent. The older child’s book, the younger one’s appointment, Saturday’s birthday, the form that has to be signed, the message from the teacher. The other person has to know all of it. It all has to live in their head.
And if it isn’t there, you remind them. And if it’s still not there, you remind them again. The conversation doesn’t close: it reopens.
The to-do list is beside the point. What never ends is the chain of conversations: each thing asks for a warning, then a confirmation, then a follow-up. The one who answers okay closes nothing. They postpone the next round.
There’s no boss and no employee, which is why it’s harder to see. The one who asks doesn’t command: they lean on how you feel. The one who receives doesn’t obey: they feel in debt.
The list can become a form of control. So can guarding your own patch and resisting anyone who tells you how to run it. But the power isn’t shared out equally: whoever decides what deserves a reminder and what the other person needs to know holds an advantage that’s hard to see.
Why does the dynamic last? Because the one who withdraws also gains something. Insistence finds its echo in withdrawal, and withdrawal in insistence. The dynamic feeds itself: each reaction confirms what the other already suspected.
Silence doesn’t close anything either. It changes whose turn it is.
The list never ends. Neither does the watching.
Allison Daminger called this cognitive work: anticipating, identifying options, deciding and supervising. It usually falls to the one who remembers. The one who insists isn’t always in control. Often they insist because, if they didn’t, nobody would. But insistence, even when it’s justified, also transfers the worry.
Each person has their own list, but only one of them counts. What’s urgent for one is just another interruption for the other. Whoever keeps the list decides what enters the other person’s list, every day, without saying so.
The division of labour is the excuse. What’s really being negotiated is who gets to make the other person feel obliged to do the tasks. And that works without hierarchy, without orders and without anyone to point at.
Two Weeks Off
Back to the office.
The one who resubmitted the invoice doesn’t put on a show. He spots the error, fixes it and doesn’t mention it. No meeting, no email, no account of how he did it. His job is to make sure nothing happens, and when it works, it leaves no trace.
The company calls this efficiency. It could also call it dependency: the procedure lives in his head and nowhere else.
One week, the account manager goes on leave. The crisis is conspicuously absent. The renewals keep going out.
Another week, the admin clerk is off. The next rejected invoice sits unresolved until he’s back. The client’s portal has become a safe, and nobody knows the combination.
The company discovers it depended on someone whose work it barely saw. And nobody calls a meeting to congratulate the admin clerk.
One had made himself visible by dragging everyone in. The other had made himself indispensable without dragging anyone in.
If turning a problem into a crisis earns visibility, and fixing it quietly goes unnoticed, what behaviour is being rewarded?
It rewards the crisis. The one who puts out the fire is paid in visibility. The one who prevents the fire gets nothing.
The CEO knows who to congratulate. Everyone else takes note. Next time there’ll be another urgent email. After all, the last crisis was very well handled.
The Email That Would Have Been Enough
Back to Tuesday. Instead of triggering the crisis, the account manager could have asked admin to check the invoice. Six minutes later, at 9:18, he could have written:
The invoice was rejected because the purchase order number was missing. Admin is resubmitting it today. I’ll confirm once it’s sorted.
The client would have received the corrected invoice. The CEO could have got on with other things. Eight people would have kept working.
And if admin had found nothing, there was still a possible email:
The client hasn’t paid and I don’t yet know why. I’m looking into it with admin. I don’t need anything from you. If it’s still unresolved by Thursday, I’ll tell you what I need.
It says who’s handling it, what’s expected of the others, and when it comes back. You read it and get on with your day.
Cost of the short version: six minutes.
Cost of the crisis: 20 hours, two meetings, a chat channel and a contract reviewed.
The difference appears in no report.
It would have resolved an incident without having a crisis to recount. And probably nobody would have congratulated him.
—Now that you know too, it’s no longer just mine.
Between all of them, nobody solved anything.