I Already Knew

Sometime back, an escalation mail landed in my inbox about a production issue.

As I read through the thread, I knew exactly what it was about. The team had been releasing builds from local machines because the CI/CD setup wasn’t working correctly. I had spotted the risk earlier and raised it directly with the lead. We had discussed it and agreed it needed to be fixed.

I never checked whether it was.

The next time I heard about it, the issue had already reached production and the client team had identified it before we had.

I called the lead and gave him a mouthful. At the time, it felt justified. A known gap had been left open and it had caused a production incident.

The more I read, the harder it became to treat it as somebody else’s miss. I had seen the risk, raised it, and assumed the conversation was enough. I had started treating the conversation itself as progress.

Earlier in my career, staying close to a problem was almost unavoidable. I was either doing the work myself or working closely with the people who were. As my responsibilities grew, more of my involvement started happening through conversations. I would identify a risk, ask a question, challenge an approach, and move on to the next thing. Somewhere along the way, I had started seeing my role as identifying risks rather than staying connected to whether they were actually addressed.

Once I started looking at it that way, I found myself thinking differently about the lead’s decision not to raise the issue before it became an escalation.

If I had been in his position, would I have come back with an update that the issue was still unresolved? Or would I have tried to fix it first and bring it up only if I couldn’t?

Most people would rather bring progress than uncertainty. And that choice doesn’t happen in isolation, it gets shaped by what they’ve seen happen when they surface bad news too early, without a plan attached.

The more I thought about it, the harder it became to draw a clean line between my reaction to the incident and the fact that I was hearing about it so late.

For years, I had treated those as separate problems. One was about accountability. The other was about communication.

Now I’m not so sure.

Looking back, what stands out isn’t any single decision. It’s how predictable the sequence feels. I raised the concern and moved on. The issue stayed open. The lead kept trying to solve it. I found out only after it had become visible to people outside the team. By then, we were all reacting to a different problem than the one that existed when it was still small.

None of those decisions felt unreasonable on their own.

Nobody plans for that outcome. It emerges from a series of reasonable decisions made by people trying to do their jobs.

I wish I could say that seeing this pattern has changed how I behave inside it.

I’m not sure that’s true.

It’s easy to spot these things in hindsight, with an escalation mail in front of you and enough distance to examine what happened. It’s much harder to recognize them in the moment, when you’re frustrated by an outcome and convinced you’re reacting to the problem in front of you.

For a long time, I saw it as a story about a known issue that wasn’t fixed.

Now, when I think about it, I see something else as well. I see a risk that I raised and never followed up on. I see a lead who chose not to bring me a problem he still thought he could solve. And I see my own reaction sitting somewhere in the middle of those two things.

The uncomfortable part is that I can draw a fairly straight line between them.

Whether I can break that line the next time around is a different question.