Preparing We Can’t Keep Doing This

The third PressureReady book is now in active development. Its title is also the sentence heard in almost every strained team eventually: We Can’t Keep Doing This.

Nobody usually says it at the beginning. At the beginning, capable people move. Plans are cancelled. Calls are taken at impossible hours. Somebody rebuilds the schedule, somebody finds the missing equipment and somebody decides that sleep can wait. The work has to be done. Analysis comes later.

The sentence arrives after the report has gone out, the operation has opened or the system has stayed online. From the outside, the organisation looks successful. Inside, the people who carried it know that success had a narrow margin.

From symptoms to structure

Sometimes the sentence means workload is too high. Sometimes priorities change too often, ownership is unclear, handovers fail, decisions arrive late or experienced people permanently compensate for missing design. Most often, several of these things reinforce one another.

The book asks what kind of system needs to be rescued every week. It looks at private spreadsheets, concentrated memory, unofficial authority, personal contacts, repeated exceptions and the reliable people who absorb uncertainty the formal organisation has failed to resolve.

Rescue dependency

The central framework is rescue dependency: normal delivery repeatedly relies on exceptional intervention that the organisation does not plan, price, protect or learn from. A workaround may be completely sensible in one moment. Dependency begins when the moment keeps returning and the organisation still calls it exceptional.

Five signals help expose the pattern: frequency, concentration, concealment, displacement and recurrence. How often is rescue needed? Does it depend on the same people? Does the official report hide how the result was achieved? What other work or recovery was displaced? Did the last rescue alter the conditions that caused it?

Why good organisations miss it

The problem is not confined to cynical or incompetent organisations. It often grows fastest in organisations full of conscientious people. They care about the mission, have enough skill to improvise and dislike exposing the user to internal weakness. Their competence delays the moment when the system must change.

Positive language can hide the condition. Customer focus becomes permission to accept every request. Empowerment becomes responsibility without authority. Agility becomes an absence of planning. Resilience becomes tolerance of chronic overload. Collaboration becomes dependence on favours.

What repair looks like

The book separates three levels of intervention. Containment protects the immediate outcome and prevents harm. Stabilisation restores capacity, closes temporary routes and clarifies ownership. Redesign changes the demand, authority, process, information or capability so the same rescue is no longer required.

Many organisations are strong at containment. The output returns, the crisis meeting ends and attention moves elsewhere. The temporary measure remains. The people receive thanks and return to a full workload. That is why the same sentence comes back.

The manuscript is planned for September 2026, but it remains in development and the date is deliberately described as planned. It will be the widest and probably the most uncomfortable book in the trilogy. That is also why it needs to be finished carefully.

The test running through it is simple: can ordinary, competent people, working reasonable hours inside a clear system, reliably produce good work? When the answer is no, the organisation may still be delivering. It is simply borrowing from the future.