[afarrell]

> What was in it for the foundation to get rid of her sooner?

It just occured to me just now that this has some similarities to technical debt:

- The costs to the individual employees are a lot more obvious to those individuals than the costs to the organization as a whole are to the leadership.

- The costs to the organization are both real but hard to quantify: Higher turnover, missed opportunities because staff don't have breathing space to think about seizing them, decreased ability to execute on goals. The costs to the organization of solving it are much more tangible: an immediate and sharp hit to the ability to execute on some things right now. Its easy for someone to argue that it is too costly to solve and hard to push back on that.

- Requires leadership to be able to recognize the symptoms of the problem, to keep open communication channels that would let diagnostic information bubble up, to acknowledge that there is a tangible cost to taking action but agree that its worth it to avoid the larger hidden costs, and to actually take that action.

I suspect there is probably a good essay to be written (or which has been written) which defines this category of organizational rot and fleshes out the specific leadership habits that are needed to notice and fix it.

[wonderbear]

That analogy is fantastic.