If One Person Has to Hold the Whole System Together, the System Doesn’t Work

There is usually one person.

You know the one.

They know where the files are. They remember which version is current. They know who needs to approve the newsletter, which volunteer still needs a reminder, what happened at last year’s event, why the website says something different from the brochure, and which donor gets annoyed if nobody calls them back.

They write the social posts.

They fix the flyer.

They update the calendar.

They answer the email nobody else knows how to answer.

They remember the thing everyone else forgot.

And because they are competent, reliable, and deeply invested in the work, the organization keeps functioning.

Which can make the system look healthier than it actually is.

That person becomes the workaround.

Competence can hide a broken system

When the work gets done, organizations naturally assume the process must be working.

But sometimes the process is not working at all.

Sometimes one very capable person is compensating for unclear roles, scattered information, inconsistent approval processes, outdated tools, missing documentation, or decisions that live entirely inside somebody’s head.

The work still happens.

The newsletter still goes out.

The event still launches.

The social post still appears.

So nobody sees the structural problem.

They see a reliable employee.

And the reliable employee quietly becomes the infrastructure.

That is not sustainability.

That is overfunctioning.

Many communication problems are not really communication problems

An organization may say:

“We need to post more consistently.”

But the real problem may be that nobody knows who approves content.

“We need a better newsletter.”

But the real problem may be that information arrives from five people in five formats three hours before the deadline.

“We need someone to manage social media.”

But the real problem may be that the organization has never decided what it wants social media to accomplish.

“We need better messaging.”

But the real problem may be that different departments are operating from different understandings of what the organization actually does.

The visible problem is communication.

The underlying problem may be workflow, ownership, decision-making, documentation, capacity, or technology.

That distinction matters.

Because if we solve only the visible problem, we often create a prettier version of the same broken system.

Good communication needs structure behind it

Strong communications work is not just writing better copy.

It is building an environment in which clear communication can happen repeatedly without requiring heroics.

That means understanding who supplies information, who checks facts, who approves public materials, where files live, how decisions are recorded, what the audience actually needs, and what the organization has the capacity to maintain.

It means asking questions like:

Who owns this?

Who needs to approve it?

Where does the information come from?

What happens if that person is unavailable?

What are we actually trying to accomplish?

What can we realistically sustain?

Those questions are not glamorous.

They are also where a surprising amount of communications strategy lives.

AI does not automatically solve this

Right now, organizations are being told that AI will help them work faster.

Sometimes it will.

But speed is only useful when the underlying system is sound.

AI can amplify a good system.

It can also accelerate a bad one.

If one overloaded employee is already writing the newsletter, fixing the website, answering community questions, managing social media, designing graphics, organizing events, and carrying the organization’s institutional memory, giving that employee AI does not necessarily solve the capacity problem.

It may simply help them overfunction faster.

Now they can produce more content in less time.

Wonderful.

They are still the only person holding the entire structure together.

Technology should expand human capacity, not disguise the fact that the system depends on one exhausted human.

The goal is not dependence

I think good consulting should eventually make the consultant less necessary.

The goal is not to become another person the organization cannot function without.

The goal is to leave behind clearer language, better workflows, useful tools, documented decisions, stronger systems, and people who understand how to carry the work forward.

That requires collaboration.

The people inside an organization know things the consultant does not.

They know the history, the relationships, the politics, the constraints, the audience, the bruises, the ambitions, and the thousand tiny realities that never make it into the official documents.

A consultant can bring perspective, structure, pattern recognition, strategy, and outside expertise.

The organization brings lived knowledge.

That is why I keep coming back to one principle:

Collaboration increases accuracy and ownership. Systems keep collaboration from becoming chaos.

The strongest work usually happens somewhere between those two.

Better communication. Stronger systems. Less overfunctioning.

I am increasingly convinced that communication strategy cannot be separated from the systems that make communication possible.

A beautiful campaign cannot repair an organization that does not know who makes decisions.

A clever AI tool cannot compensate for missing ownership.

A new social media calendar cannot fix chronic capacity problems.

And no organization should quietly require one extraordinarily capable person to be its memory, emergency response team, creative department, project manager, copywriter, archivist, and human duct tape.

If the work only gets done because one person is constantly overfunctioning, the system does not actually work.

The question is not:

How do we get that person to do more?

The better question is:

What would we have to change so the work no longer depends on them doing everything?

That is the kind of question I want to keep asking.

And increasingly, it is the work I am building JJ Holmes Communications around.

Better communication. Stronger systems. Less overfunctioning.