Single Points of Failure Have Names — and They're Sitting in Your Team Meeting

Every team I've worked with has one. The person whose name comes up when somebody says, 'oh, only Priya knows how to do that.' It's said fondly, usually. Occasionally with a hint of pride from Priya herself.

I'd like us to stop treating that as a compliment.

Not because Priya has done anything wrong. She hasn't. She's competent, reliable, and probably the reason a few things haven't collapsed this year. But 'only Priya knows' isn't a fact about Priya. It's a fact about the team, and it isn't a good one.

The understudy rule, in one line

Every task that would cause real disruption if it stopped needs a named second person who has done it at least once in the last twelve months, without help.

That's it. That's the rule. No framework, no maturity model, no three-day course. Just a name in a column next to another name.

It's borrowed, obviously. Theatre has understudies. Airlines have co-pilots. Hospitals roster so that no shift depends on one person's recall. Offices, for reasons never fully explained, tend to skip this entirely and hope for the best.

Start by finding the single points

You don't need a full skills audit for this. You need a blunt question, asked in a room, with the door shut.

If this person were off for six weeks with no notice, what would stop?

Go round the team and write down the answers. You'll get eight to fifteen items. Some will be trivial — someone's the only one who can update the website banner, fine. Others will make the room go quiet.

Then rank them. Three tiers is plenty:

Red — it stops the work, the money or the compliance. Payroll. The statutory return. Whatever keeps the licence valid.

Amber — it doesn't stop, but it slows badly and somebody spends a week learning under pressure.

Green — mildly annoying, genuinely fine.

Only the reds need a proper plan this quarter. The ambers can follow. The greens can be left alone, and being honest about that is part of the point. If everything's critical, nothing is, and the exercise dies of its own seriousness.

The resistance is usually about identity

Here's the uncomfortable bit. People resist this, and it's rarely about time.

For whoever holds the knowledge, being the only one who can do something is a form of job security. It's also, quietly, a form of identity. Being the one who does the VAT return is a small sentence that means something. Asking them to hand some of that over can land as a demotion, or worse, as a hint that they're being edged out.

So say the quiet part out loud. Being the only person who can do something isn't a safeguard; it's a trap. It means you can't take a proper holiday. It means you're on the laptop at nine the night before a deadline. It means that when a promotion comes up, the first thing your manager thinks is, but who would do the returns?

The understudy rule protects the holder as much as the team. That framing gets far less resistance than 'we need to de-risk you.'

For managers, there's a second resistance: it's quicker to just do it yourself. True this week. Catastrophically false the week someone's off sick.

Low-effort ways to build a back-up

The mistake is assuming a back-up needs a training day. It almost never does. None of the following needs a budget line.

The two-hander. Next time the task comes round, the back-up sits alongside and does it while the holder watches. Not the other way round. Doing it is the whole point — watching creates a spectator, not a back-up.

The holiday swap. Deliberately line up the holder's annual leave with a live cycle of the task. August is a gift here. The back-up runs it for real, with the holder reachable by phone for genuine emergencies only, and finds out what actually goes wrong.

The note that already exists. Ask for the one-pager while nothing is happening. It's a twenty-minute job when the task isn't due. It's a nightmare at four o'clock on the deadline.

The five-minute walkthrough. Whoever did the task last explains it to whoever's doing it next. Costs nothing, takes minutes, builds a habit.

The deliberate slow week. Pick one recurring task a quarter and let the back-up do it slowly but correctly. It'll take them three times as long. That's the investment, and it's cheaper than the alternative.

One rule about the list

Keep it visible. A back-up list living in a manager's head is a rumour, not a plan. Put it in the team's shared space, review it twice a year, and update it when people move on.

And check it's real. The test isn't whether a name is in the column — it's whether that person has actually pressed the button in the last twelve months. A back-up who has never run the task live is theoretical, and theory has a habit of evaporating at exactly the wrong moment.

Three reds, one quarter

Don't try to fix the whole list. Take the three reddest items, name a back-up for each, and put a date in the diary for the first live run. That's a quarter's work for most teams, and it's enough to change how the place feels.

Then, next time somebody says only one person knows how to do that, it can be a sentence about the past rather than a description of the present.

Which is where it belongs.