1. The Last Mile Fallacy
There is a curious social contract in restaurants.
We tip the waiter.
Not the chef.
Not the line cook.
Not the person who spent hours sourcing ingredients, refining techniques, or burning their fingers so the dish arrives perfectly balanced.
We reward the last mile.
The person who carried the plate from the kitchen to the table receives the recognition, while the people who actually created the asset remain invisible. This is not irrational. The waiter is the human interface. But it is revealing. We reward proximity, not creation.
Organisations behave in exactly the same way.
2. Delegated Glory in Software Engineering
In technology organisations, recognition frequently flows to the person standing in the meeting. The one presenting slides, narrating progress, answering high level questions, and translating work into executive language is often congratulated for their hard work.
The engineers who designed the system, diagnosed failures, untangled concurrency issues, and carried operational risk are usually not in the room. They are building.
They might get a passing reference as the team.
They rarely receive credit proportional to the value or risk they absorbed.
This is delegated glory. Credit flows to the narrator rather than the creator.
3. Where Key Man Risk Actually Lives
One of the strangest distortions in large organisations is where key man risk is believed to sit.
It is commonly assigned to:
- Programme managers
- Delivery leads
- Reporting owners
- Single points of escalation
But almost never to:
- The engineer who understands data model edge cases
- The person who knows why a workaround exists
- The developer who remembers which invariants must never be broken
- The architect who understands what will cascade when something fails
When the person presenting progress is asked a detailed question and responds with:
“I am not close to the details on this one. Let me check with the team and get back to you.”
That is not a minor inconvenience. It is a map of where real knowledge and real risk actually live.
4. Brokerage: When It Is Useful and When It Becomes a Tax
Brokerage exists because coordination is real work.
It is valuable when:
- Cognitive load exceeds what one team can reasonably manage
- Dependencies span multiple domains
- Engineers need protection from organisational noise
- Someone is actively reducing friction, ambiguity, and rework
Good brokerage collapses complexity.
But many organisations allow brokerage to mutate into something else.
A layer where:
- Information is forwarded, not synthesised
- Status is narrated, not owned
- Risk is described, not mitigated
- Decisions are escalated rather than made
At this point brokerage stops being additive and becomes a tax on execution.
5. Why Senior Leaders Prefer Brokers Over Proximity
Senior leaders often claim they want transparency, yet design systems that maximise distance from the work.
Data is expected to flow upward through brokers rather than leaders leaving their offices and sitting with the teams doing the work. This is not accidental.
Brokers provide a clean interface. They translate messy reality into tidy narratives, percentages, and traffic lights. Reality is noisy and uncomfortable. Slides are not.
Brokerage also preserves authority. When information is mediated, leaders remain decision makers rather than participants. Sitting with teams requires admitting uncertainty, asking naive questions, and occasionally being wrong in public.
Proximity is cognitively expensive. Real work involves trade offs, dead ends, partial failures, and ambiguity. Brokerage filters this into updates that fit neatly into calendar slots.
Finally, brokerage protects leaders from accountability. If outcomes fail, failure can be attributed to execution. Direct engagement collapses the boundary between strategy and delivery.
The irony is that leaders who rely exclusively on brokers often believe they are well informed, while systematically excluding themselves from the information that matters most.
6. Why Senior Leaders Rarely Visit the Front Line
If proximity to the work is so valuable, the obvious question is why senior leaders so rarely go to call centers, operations floors, or engineering teams.
The answer is not time. It is discomfort.
The front line is where reality is unfiltered. Customers are frustrated. Systems are brittle. Workarounds are everywhere. None of this fits neatly into a slide deck.
There is also a loss of control. In a call center or engineering space, leaders cannot rely on prepared narratives. Questions are answered in real time by people who know the truth.
Status plays a role as well. Executive roles often come with physical and symbolic distance. Different floors, separate entrances, curated briefings. Walking the floor collapses hierarchy and invites unscripted conversations, including the possibility of being corrected.
Proximity also creates obligation. Once leaders hear problems directly, they can no longer claim ignorance. It becomes harder to justify slow change or abstract prioritisation.
Organisations often train leaders away from the front line by rewarding narrative clarity and stakeholder management over depth of understanding.
The result is a paradox. The people with the most authority are often the furthest from the work, while the people with the least authority carry the most operational truth.
7. The Return to Office Irony
There is a quiet irony playing out in many organisations.
Senior leaders increasingly call staff back to the office, speaking about collaboration, culture, and the value of presence. Being together, we are told, matters.
And yet those same leaders often remain in their offices, on executive floors, behind calendars filled with internal meetings, while the teams they summoned back sit a few levels down.
Presence is demanded, but not reciprocated.
If being in the office improves communication, it only does so when leaders leave their rooms and engage directly with the people doing the work.
Instead, the burden of visibility is asymmetrical. Engineers, agents, and operators commute, badge in, and are physically present. Leaders remain mediated by assistants, decks, and brokers.
When presence flows in only one direction, return to office becomes less about collaboration and more about control.
Delegated glory thrives on this distance. Proximity is enforced, but understanding is still outsourced.
8. The Vanishing Layer Test
A simple thought experiment exposes whether brokerage is necessary or ornamental.
What would fail if all project managers and middle management vanished tomorrow?
If the answer is:
- Work stops
- Dependencies collapse
- Priorities become unclear
- Decisions stall
Then there is a genuine coordination problem.
But if the answer is:
- Status decks disappear
- Meetings shrink
- Engineers talk directly
- Decisions move closer to the work
Then the organisation does not have a coordination layer. It has a delegated glory layer.
9. The Long Term Cost of Delegated Glory
When creators are invisible, behaviour changes.
Craftsmanship gives way to optics.
Ownership erodes because credit does not follow effort.
Knowledge becomes hoarded because visibility is scarce.
The best engineers disengage or leave quietly.
Organisations end up with excellent narrators and fewer people willing to do the hard, unglamorous work of building and maintaining systems.
Eventually the kitchen empties.
10. Reattaching Glory to Creation
This is not an argument for eliminating leadership, coordination, or reporting.
It is an argument for reattaching recognition to creation.
Healthy organisations:
- Put engineers in rooms where decisions are made
- Attribute success explicitly to the people who did the work
- Treat narration as a service, not a status multiplier
- Identify key man risk where knowledge actually lives
- Promote those who reduce distance from the work
The waiter still matters.
But no restaurant survives if the kitchen walks out.
And no organisation thrives when the people doing the real work are invisible while others collect the applause.
Delegated glory feels efficient.
Until the creators stop cooking.