Small problems spread fast when systems are weak, turning minor errors into cascading failures that stall teams and burn leaders out. In this article, Jef Menguin explains what cascading failures are and shares practical ways to design systems that stop problems before they multiply. Read it and share it with your team so you prevent breakdowns, protect momentum, and keep work moving even under pressure.
It started like any other Monday. One key person was out. Not sick enough to trigger alarms. Not senior enough to call a meeting. Just “out for a few days.” By Tuesday, approvals slowed. By Wednesday, deadlines slipped. By Thursday, people were working late, guessing instead of deciding. On Friday, a client followed up—politely at first, then with concern.
Nothing big failed. But everything felt off.
Most managers don’t notice this moment because it doesn’t look dramatic. There is no system crash. No angry email copied to the CEO. Just small delays stacking on top of each other. By the time leaders step in, the team is already tired, reactive, and frustrated.
This is how cascading failures begin. Quietly. Predictably.
What cascading failure really means at work
A cascading failure happens when one small breakdown triggers another, and then another, until the system can no longer recover on its own.
This is not the same as a one-time mistake. A typo can be corrected. A bad call can be reversed. Cascading failures are different because the problem moves. You fix one issue, but another pops up somewhere else. Work keeps flowing, but value doesn’t.
You see this pattern everywhere:
- One unclear decision leads to rework, which leads to overtime, which leads to errors.
- One delayed approval creates a backlog that spills into the next project.
- One weak handoff forces the next team to guess, and guessing becomes the norm.
People often blame individuals when this happens. “If only she planned better.” “If only he followed up.”
But cascading failures don’t come from bad people. They come from fragile systems—systems that depend too much on perfect timing, heroic effort, or one person holding everything together.
Why teams are more vulnerable than they think
Many teams believe they are resilient because they have survived chaos before. They pride themselves on working harder when things go wrong. And yes, that helps—at first.
The problem is that workarounds hide weakness.
When people compensate for broken processes, leaders don’t see the cracks. When teams stay quiet and just push through, the system never improves. The same problems repeat, only with new faces and higher stakes.
Over time, three things happen:
- Small issues stop getting reported early.
- Firefighting becomes normal work.
- Learning stays in the classroom instead of changing daily behavior.
This is why training alone doesn’t prevent cascading failures. Insight helps people understand the problem. Systems help people act differently every day. Without systems, learning fades. Without practice, nothing compounds.
If you want to stop the dominoes, you don’t start by telling people to be more careful. You start by designing systems that make the next failure harder to trigger.
Systems are how you protect “how to win”
Most managers treat cascading failures as an operations problem. A workflow issue. A staffing issue. A “we just need to be more disciplined” issue.
But if you use the Playing to Win lens, cascading failures are a strategy problem.
Because strategy is not what you announce. Strategy is what your organization can repeat under pressure. When your system collapses from one small disruption, you lose the ability to win in the way you said you would.
Think about the five choices in Playing to Win.
Your winning aspiration often includes words like trust, quality, speed, customer delight, growth. But those are fragile promises if your team cannot deliver consistently.
Your where to play and how to win are your bets. Maybe you win through fast turnaround. Maybe you win through reliable service. Maybe you win through premium quality. Cascading failures attack these advantages directly. One delay becomes a backlog. One backlog becomes missed commitments. Missed commitments become lost trust. Lost trust becomes lost business.
Your capabilities are what you must be good at to win. Reliability. Clear handoffs. Fast decisions. Problem detection. When cascading failures happen, those capabilities are not “weak.” They are missing or unsupported.
And then you reach the last choice: management systems.
This is where many strategies quietly die.
Management systems are the routines, rules, and tools that make good performance normal. They are not posters. They are not reminders. They are what your managers do every week, what teams check every day, and what gets measured without drama.
Your strategy is only as strong as the systems that protect it.
If you want to win, you cannot rely on people constantly saving the day. You build a system that makes winning repeatable.
The Domino Map: find the chain before it falls
Most teams only see the last domino. The customer complaint. The missed deadline. The urgent escalation. That’s the part that hurts, so that’s the part they fix.
But the last domino is not the cause. It’s the result.
So you need a simple way to spot the chain early. I use a tool called a Domino Map. It’s not fancy. It’s just a clear picture of how one small failure spreads across your work.
Here’s how to do it in 10–15 minutes with your team:
Start with a trigger you’ve seen before. A key person is absent. A supplier is late. A client changes scope. A system slows down. An approval is delayed.
Write it down as the first event.
Then ask one question, repeatedly: What breaks next?
Not “Who failed next?” Not “Why are people like this?” Just: what breaks next in the workflow?
You keep going until you reach the visible damage—the part everyone complains about.
As you map, watch for the common amplifiers. These are the things that turn a small issue into a chain reaction:
- One person is the only one who can do or approve a task.
- Handoffs are unclear, so teams guess.
- Work piles up because priorities keep changing.
- Decisions take too long, so everything waits.
- There is no early warning signal, so problems arrive late and loud.
When your Domino Map is done, circle two things:
- The first domino you can strengthen (the earliest point where a small fix prevents a big mess).
- The amplifier you can remove (the thing that makes the chain spread faster).
Here’s a simple example you might recognize:
A manager is out for two days. Approvals pause. Requests pile up. People start work without clear direction. Rework increases. Deadlines slip. The team works late. Errors rise. A client escalates.
Notice what this reveals. The core problem is not the absence. The core problem is that the system treats one person as a gate.
And once you see that, you stop chasing symptoms. You start designing protection.
A Domino Map does not solve everything. But it gives you what most teams lack: clarity about where the chain actually starts.
The four system moves that stop cascades
Once you can see the domino chain, the next step is not a big transformation program. It’s a small set of system moves you can repeat.
Think of these as “anti-domino” moves. Each one reduces the chance that a small issue becomes a chain reaction.
A) Remove single points of failure
A single point of failure is any task where the team depends on one person to keep work moving. One approver. One expert. One person who “knows where the file is.” One person who can talk to a client. One person who can fix the spreadsheet.
This is common in growing teams. It often starts as efficiency. “Let’s just have one owner so it’s faster.” Then the owner becomes a gate. The gate becomes a bottleneck. The bottleneck becomes a breakdown.
The fix is not “train everyone on everything.” That’s impossible. The fix is to start with the top three tasks that keep your operation alive and design backup.
You can do this in simple ways:
- Assign a deputy for each critical task.
- Create a short “how it works” note for repeat tasks.
- Record a 5-minute walkthrough for the next person.
- Make a shared checklist for what “done” looks like.
The goal is not perfect coverage. The goal is a team that can keep moving even when one person is missing.
B) Build buffers that prevent panic
Buffers are not laziness. Buffers are protection.
Most cascading failures happen because work is scheduled with no room for reality. Everything is “urgent.” Everything is “ASAP.” Every deadline is tight. When one thing slips, everything else gets pushed, and the system starts to collapse.
Buffers can be designed in small, practical ways:
- Put a 24-hour buffer before external deadlines.
- Limit how many projects can be “in progress” at the same time.
- Create a rule: no new urgent requests after a certain cutoff unless a leader agrees to trade-offs.
- Block focus time for teams doing deep work, so they can finish instead of constantly restarting.
A buffer is simply a decision to give your system room to breathe. When you remove buffers, you force people to become the buffer. That’s when burnout rises, errors increase, and dominoes fall faster.
C) Tighten handoffs, because dominoes love handoffs
Most work fails in the space between people.
One team “throws” something over the wall. Another team catches it late, incomplete, or unclear. Then they ask questions, wait for answers, and guess when answers are slow. The domino chain begins.
The fix is to design better handoffs, not to demand better attitudes.
You do that by defining what “ready” and “done” mean. You also use checklists and templates so people don’t rely on memory.
Here’s a simple handoff script you can teach teams to use:
- What is this? (One sentence.)
- What does success look like? (Two to three criteria.)
- When do we need it? (A date and time.)
- What might block this? (One risk.)
- Who owns the next step? (A name.)
This takes two minutes. But it prevents days of confusion.
When handoffs improve, rework drops. When rework drops, pressure drops. When pressure drops, systems stop snapping under stress.
D) Speed up decisions with clear rules
Slow decisions create invisible queues. People wait. Work stops. Then deadlines approach, panic rises, and teams start making guesses.
A surprising number of cascading failures are not caused by lack of effort. They are caused by unclear decision rights.
So you create decision rules:
- What decisions can the team make without approval?
- What decisions need leader approval?
- What decisions require cross-team alignment?
- What criteria should people use when choosing?
Even one rule can change everything. For example: “If the cost impact is below X, the team can decide.” Or: “If it affects a client commitment, we escalate within 24 hours.”
When decision speed improves, work flow improves. And when flow improves, small failures have less space to multiply.
The weekly manager routine: your management system in 30 minutes
Many managers want better systems, but they treat systems as a project. Something they’ll fix “when things calm down.” The problem is that things don’t calm down. The pressure keeps coming. So the system stays the same.
You need a weekly routine. A small management system you can actually sustain.
This one takes 30 minutes total. It prevents cascading failures by forcing early detection and small repairs.
Monday: Domino Scan (10 minutes)
At the start of the week, ask: What is most likely to break this week?
You are not trying to predict everything. You are simply scanning for risk:
- Who is overloaded?
- What deliverable is tight?
- What dependency is shaky?
- What approval could stall us?
Then choose one possible “first domino” and decide how you will strengthen it. Even a small move helps: assign backup, clarify handoff, adjust timeline, remove a bottleneck.
Midweek: Constraint Check (10 minutes)
Midweek is where small problems become big problems.
So you ask: Where is work piling up right now?
Look for queues:
- Requests waiting for approval
- Tasks blocked by missing info
- Projects stuck because two teams can’t align
- People doing too much at once
Then make one decision that clears flow. It might be as simple as setting a priority, removing a task, or deciding a trade-off. The goal is not to work harder. The goal is to keep work moving cleanly.
Friday: Fix One Domino (10 minutes)
This is the compounding habit.
Every Friday, you fix one small thing in the system so next week is easier:
- Create a checklist for a recurring handoff.
- Write a one-page “how we do this” guide.
- Define a decision rule for a repeating approval.
- Set a buffer for a deadline that always slips.
- Assign backup for a single point of failure.
One fix per week sounds small. But it changes the game. After 10 weeks, you don’t just have a smarter team. You have a stronger system.
And that’s the point.
Cascading failures don’t stop because people become more motivated. They stop because leaders build routines that make improvement normal.
Insight is not the same as practice
Most organizations respond to recurring problems with training. A workshop on planning. A session on communication. A course on leadership or agility.
People leave these sessions feeling clearer. Motivated. Even excited.
Then Monday comes.
Email piles up. Meetings fill the calendar. Urgent work crowds out reflection. The ideas make sense, but the system people return to is the same one that caused the problem in the first place. So behavior snaps back.
This is not because people don’t care. It’s because insight does not survive friction.
Training gives people language. Systems give people leverage. Without a way to practice new behaviors in real work, learning becomes a one-time event instead of a capability.
This is why cascading failures keep returning even after “good training.” Teams know what to do. They just don’t have a structure that makes the new way stick. When pressure rises, people fall back on habit. And habits are shaped by systems, not slides.
If learning does not change what people do on a normal Tuesday, it will not protect you on a stressful Friday.
What a Shift Experience looks like when preventing dominoes
This is where a different approach to learning matters.
A Shift Experience is not designed to impress people. It is designed to convert learning into daily practice. The goal is not understanding. The goal is repeatable behavior that improves the system week after week.
A well-designed Shift Experience follows a simple flow.
First, Mirror. Teams look at their own work. Not theory. Not best practices from somewhere else. They map their real domino chains. They see where small failures start, how handoffs break, and where the system depends on heroics.
Then, Shift. They are introduced to a small set of tools—like the Domino Map and the four system moves. Not ten frameworks. Not a thick manual. Just enough structure to see their work differently and make better choices.
Next, Win. Teams apply the tools immediately. During the session, they redesign one handoff, remove one single point of failure, or set one decision rule. They leave having already improved the system once. That early win builds confidence and momentum.
Finally, Act. This is where most learning programs stop—but this is where the Shift Experience begins. Teams commit to a short cycle, usually 30 days. Every week, managers run the 30-minute routine. Every week, they fix one domino. They track what improves and adjust.
Typical “Act” challenges are simple and concrete:
- Build a backup plan for one critical role.
- Create and test one handoff checklist.
- Define one decision rule that speeds up approvals.
- Add one buffer to a deadline that always slips.
Nothing here is dramatic. That’s the point.
Cascading failures are not stopped by big speeches or perfect plans. They are stopped when leaders design learning that lives inside the work, and systems that get better through use.
When learning becomes practice, and practice improves the system, the dominoes stop falling.
The leader’s test: are you building heroes or building reliability?
Every system sends a message.
Some systems say, “Be careful.” Others say, “Work harder.” The best systems say, “We’ve thought this through.”
Here is a simple test for leaders. You don’t need a survey or a dashboard. Just observe.
What happens when one person is absent? Does work slow down slightly, or does it freeze?
When something goes wrong, do people surface it early, or do you hear about it only when it’s already urgent?
Do the same problems keep coming back with different names, different projects, different people?
If your team survives because a few people always step up, you don’t have a strong system. You have strong individuals carrying a weak design.
Hero culture feels good in the short term. It creates stories of sacrifice and commitment. But over time, it hides problems, exhausts your best people, and makes success unpredictable. Reliability, on the other hand, feels quiet. Work flows. Issues surface early. Wins look boring—but they repeat.
Leaders shape this more than they realize. When leaders reward firefighting, they get more fires. When leaders ask better system questions, teams build better systems.
The most important question is not, “Who saved us?” It is, “What made saving necessary?”
A 24-hour action: fix the first domino today
You don’t need to redesign your organization to start. You just need to stop one domino.
Within the next 24 hours, do this:
Pick one recurring breakdown. Not the biggest. Not the most political. Just the one that quietly wastes time every week.
Spend 15 minutes with your team and map the domino chain:
- What is the first small failure?
- What breaks next?
- Where does the pain finally show up?
Then choose one small system move:
- Assign a backup.
- Clarify a handoff.
- Set a decision rule.
- Add a buffer.
- Create a simple checklist.
Test it for seven days.
If it helps, keep it. If it doesn’t, adjust. Then do it again next week.
This is how systems improve—not through grand redesigns, but through steady, visible practice.
Cascading failures thrive in silence and delay. They shrink when leaders act early.
Stop the dominoes by strengthening the first tile.
If you’re building a business and you are playing to win…
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