The finding
Nelson Repenning and John Sterman’s research on what they term the “capability trap” used system dynamics modelling and more than a dozen case studies to examine why process-improvement efforts so often fail to take hold under pressure. Their central finding is that managers under sustained pressure systematically default to working harder — more hours, more effort, more direct intervention — rather than working smarter, because the people who successfully prevent problems from occurring receive no visible credit for the problems that never happened. Visible firefighting gets recognised; invisible prevention does not.
Why it happens
Dubai’s rapid-growth environment intensifies exactly the conditions Repenning and Sterman describe. Jay Galbraith’s information-processing argument explains why: rapid growth raises task uncertainty faster than most organisations can build the coordination capacity to absorb it, which means the volume of problems requiring direct, visible intervention rises at the same time that the organisational bandwidth available for building preventive systems is falling. The two pressures compound each other.
The market’s workforce dynamics make the capability trap harder to escape once an organisation is inside it. A private-sector workforce with relatively high mobility between employers means that even where an individual manager successfully builds preventive process, the institutional memory of why that process exists — and the discipline to maintain it — is vulnerable to turnover in a way it would not be in a more workforce-stable market. Repenning and Sterman’s own finding that improvement, once achieved, can create “a virtuous cycle of improved capability and increasing attention to improvement” cuts both ways: the cycle is genuinely self-reinforcing once established, but it is also genuinely fragile to the loss of the people who understand why it works.
Dubai’s regulatory structure adds a further layer specific to this market. An organisation coordinating operations across mainland UAE regulation and one or more free zones is managing more distinct operational rule sets than a comparable organisation in a single-regime market, which means the volume of edge cases requiring direct managerial judgement — rather than routine, documented handling — is structurally higher here than Repenning and Sterman’s original research context would predict. Each additional edge case is itself a small instance of the working-harder-not-smarter pattern: it gets resolved in the moment, by whoever is available, rather than by a system built in advance to anticipate it.
What it looks like in practice
The pattern typically presents as a specific complaint from operational leaders: that the organisation “never has time” to fix the underlying causes of recurring problems, because it is always responding to the latest one. Repenning and Sterman’s research suggests this is not a time-management failure so much as a structural incentive problem — the visible, urgent work of firefighting is what gets noticed and rewarded, while the less visible work of prevention, which would reduce future firefighting, is systematically under-recognised and therefore under-resourced, even by well-intentioned leaders who would say, if asked directly, that prevention matters.
It is most acute in functions where growth is fastest and where the operational consequences of a missed problem are immediately visible — logistics, customer-facing operations, anything with hard external deadlines. It is less acute, though not absent, in functions with more insulated timelines, such as some back-office and compliance functions, where the cost of a prevented problem is easier to attribute even if it remains less visible than an active crisis.
A common misconception is that the answer is simply more resourcing or more headcount. Repenning and Sterman’s finding is more specific than that: the core problem is a recognition and incentive gap, not solely a capacity gap. Adding people to an organisation that still only visibly rewards firefighting tends to reproduce the same dynamic at larger scale rather than resolving it.
There is a compounding consequence worth naming directly: organisations that remain in the capability trap for an extended period tend to lose the ability to distinguish, from inside, between problems that are genuinely novel and problems that are recurring in a new disguise. When most of an operational team’s attention goes to the immediate fire, the pattern-recognition that would otherwise flag “this is the third time this has happened, for the same underlying reason” doesn’t get the space it needs to develop. The result is an organisation that experiences its own operational challenges as a constant stream of surprises, even where a smaller number of underlying, recurring causes would explain most of them if anyone had the bandwidth to look.
The pattern also interacts with how growth itself is being measured internally. Organisations that track growth primarily through output metrics — shipments completed, transactions processed, revenue booked — have a clear, visible signal for whether the firefighting is “working,” which reinforces the incentive to keep firefighting rather than invest in prevention. Organisations that also track a leading indicator of operational health — recurring-issue rates, for instance, or the proportion of problems that are genuinely novel versus repeat occurrences — have at least the visibility needed to notice the capability trap forming, even if noticing it does not automatically resolve the underlying incentive problem Repenning and Sterman describe.
Where this shows up
The questions here are set in Dubai. More Perspectives for this market are on the Dubai page, and the Markets index shows the other business hubs.
Questions worth considering
- Is the organisation’s recognition and reward system, formal or informal, currently set up to notice prevention work at all?
- Where has institutional knowledge about why a particular process exists been lost to staff turnover, leaving the process itself as an unexplained rule rather than an understood safeguard?
- Is more headcount actually the constraint, or is the constraint what the organisation currently notices and rewards?
- Does the organisation currently track any leading indicator of operational health, or only the output metrics that make firefighting look like progress?
Your team is facing similar challenges?
Subscribe to The Riddle Ledger
Perspectives are sent as they are published, with no promotional email, and you can unsubscribe at any time.