Working in the Void

The new department heads have not yet arrived. Important decisions are waiting for them. The people needed for meetings are scattered, and the components needed for production have become scarce and extraordinarily expensive. Everybody is still working. Progress is another matter.

I recently spoke with somebody working in the electronics industry. The office was unusually quiet. Summer holidays had emptied the corridors, meetings were difficult to arrange, and several important projects had reached the peculiar stage at which everybody remained busy but nobody could move decisively forward.

“Everything is more or less on hold,” he said.

This was not because there was no work to do. His list was long, the deadlines remained, and the technical questions were becoming more urgent. The difficulty was that two new department heads were expected to arrive. They would bring experience, knowledge and perhaps some of the authority needed to resolve the problems already accumulating around them.

But they had not arrived yet.

Even when they did, they would need time to understand the company, the people, the projects and the history behind earlier decisions. Everyone would want their attention. Each person would arrive with an urgent problem and a persuasive explanation of why it should be considered first.

The new managers would inherit responsibility before they had acquired context.

In the meantime, the work continued inside the gap between the leadership that was leaving and the leadership that had not yet begun.

The Decision Waiting for Its Owner

One of the most important decisions concerned the electronic components at the centre of a new system. The engineer had gathered specifications, presentations and technical documents. He had also read the manufacturer’s list of known faults in one relatively new device.

That document alone ran to around one hundred pages.

Complex hardware is never entirely free of faults. Neither is complex software. Engineers work with tolerances, safeguards and an understanding of what should happen when something goes wrong. The question is not whether faults exist, but whether they can be identified, contained and managed safely.

The engineer therefore faced a decision with consequences stretching far beyond the meeting in which it would eventually be made. A component selected now could remain embedded in a system for many years. Its limitations would have to be understood long after the original project team had moved on.

He could choose one device and push the project forward. Instead, he was trying to keep the design open across a broader family of components. That would allow development to continue without committing everything too early to one option whose weaknesses were not yet fully understood.

From the outside, this might look like hesitation. From inside the project, it was responsibility.

The incoming department head might provide the knowledge and authority needed to make the choice. But there was no guarantee. After weeks of waiting, the engineer might finally present the specifications, the risks and the hundred pages of known faults, only to receive the answer he had been trying to avoid.

“You understand the project. You decide.”

The Work Nobody Can See

The leadership transition was only part of the problem. Summer had made the ordinary machinery of coordination increasingly unreliable.

People were on holiday, travelling for work or joining meetings remotely. One person returned just as another disappeared. Bringing several managers together in the same room had become almost impossible.

This mattered because the team had built something that needed to be seen.

Hardware and software had been brought together in a laboratory. The system could be demonstrated, tested and discussed while it was physically in front of the people responsible for deciding what happened next.

Slides could explain the idea. A camera could show that something was happening. Neither could reproduce the experience of standing beside the equipment, watching it operate and asking questions as the demonstration unfolded.

The engineer had recently watched somebody attempt such a demonstration online.

“It was a joke,” he said.

The equipment appeared on the screen, but understanding did not. Details disappeared. The relationship between the components was difficult to see. A demonstration intended to create confidence became a sequence of uncertain images.

His compromise was to present the slides online and invite the managers to visit the laboratory when they were next nearby.

That solved the meeting problem by postponing the understanding problem.

Remote work had also removed something less formal but equally valuable: the conversations that happened outside scheduled meetings. A question asked in a corridor, a warning offered while passing somebody’s desk, a brief exchange revealing that another team was moving in a different direction.

Online, people appeared at the appointed time, discussed the agenda and disappeared again. It was not always clear where they were, what else they were working on or how much pressure they were carrying.

The meetings continued.

The surrounding knowledge did not.

When a Small Component Becomes a Large Problem

While decisions were waiting inside the company, the external supply chain was creating another form of paralysis.

A supplier could assemble the required electronic boards, but only if the customer provided some of the memory components. The supplier did not have enough stock to satisfy every customer and could no longer obtain the missing parts at a reasonable price.

Calls were made. Distributors were contacted. Eventually, an offer arrived.

A component normally costing only a few dollars was being offered for several dozen.

The price no longer made sense in relation to the product in which the component would be used. When one small part costs more than the amount originally calculated for a much larger section of the system, the economics of production begin to collapse.

Large customers can protect themselves through long-term contracts and direct relationships with manufacturers. Smaller industrial buyers may require only a few thousand components each year. That makes them too small to negotiate directly with the limited number of companies capable of producing what they need.

They are left to distributors and brokers, where scarcity can transform an ordinary electronic part into a highly valuable commodity.

The engineer suspected that rapidly expanding military demand was adding to the pressure. Components used in civilian industrial systems may also appear in defence equipment, and buyers working with urgent programmes and larger budgets may be able to accept prices that smaller manufacturers cannot match.

It was his interpretation, not a claim he could prove.

What he could see was the result. A company trying to build ordinary industrial equipment was competing for the same small pieces of silicon as buyers willing to pay almost any price.

The New Normal

The conversation began in a quiet office and ended with a picture of an industrial system losing its ability to move predictably.

Inside the company, projects were waiting for new leaders. The new leaders would need time to understand the projects. Physical demonstrations were being reduced to slides and camera images. Informal knowledge was disappearing between online meetings.

Outside the company, suppliers could no longer guarantee delivery. Prices no longer reflected the apparent value of the components. Smaller customers were competing in markets shaped by buyers with greater urgency, deeper pockets and stronger contractual positions.

The engineer did not expect the situation to return quickly to what it had been.

“This will be the new normal,” he said.

Many industrial economies depend upon smaller companies producing specialised equipment in modest quantities. They do not buy millions of identical parts. They build systems for particular applications, often with long working lives and demanding technical requirements.

They may have the design, the engineers and the customer. None of that matters if one necessary component cannot be obtained.

This is what makes the void difficult to recognise. It does not look like a crisis. The lights remain on. People attend meetings. Reports are prepared. Engineers continue reading specifications, calling suppliers and gathering information.

The project has not stopped.

It has lost the conditions required to move.

The new managers will eventually arrive. They may bring knowledge, direction and enough authority to release some of the delayed decisions. They cannot immediately repair a fragmented supply chain, make scarce components affordable or restore all the conversations that no longer happen around the office.

The void will not disappear simply because somebody fills the chair.

Until then, the engineer will continue doing what people often do when they remain responsible but cannot yet act. He will collect more information, keep the design open for as long as possible and prepare for the moment when waiting is no longer an option.

Everybody is working.

Sooner or later, somebody will still have to decide.