Chapter 06. THE TINY STONE THAT HELD THE WALL
A global tech giant halts overnight. Systems fail. Chaos erupts. Amid finger-pointing and silence, one question lingers: why did they remove that tiny stone?
The room was filled with people. Not just any people—these were some of the brightest minds in global tech. Cloud architects from Seattle, systems engineers from Bengaluru, infrastructure leads from Dublin. Some sat hunched over keyboards in the massive war room; others joined remotely, their faces flickering in and out on oversized monitors. The chatter was frantic, punctuated by silence when someone thought they had a lead, only for it to fizzle out in disappointment.
Nothing was working. Absolutely nothing.
Emails flew. Executives barked. Clients threatened to pull out. There were talks of regulatory risks, lawsuits, and millions lost by the hour. The CIO issued a statement: “We are working around the clock to restore full functionality.”
But under the gloss of corporate speak, panic reigned.
No one knew where the failure began.
Team Atlas (Infrastructure Ops) insisted everything was fine on their end.
“All servers are green. No anomalies in our dashboards.”
Team Beacon (Data Engineering) threw their hands up.
“Our ETL jobs ran successfully last night. If the downstream’s broken, talk to Catalyst.”
Team Catalyst (Business Automation) pushed back hard.
“No, no, this smells like a legacy issue. Talk to Delta.”
Team Delta (Legacy Systems) wasn’t sure.
“Let us… check with our experts. Some of those modules were touched years ago.”
Team Echo (Integration and APIs) said flatly:
“We’ve had zero deployments in the last 10 days. Must be upstream.”
And on and on it went.
"Whose problem is it?"
No one knows.
Fingers were pointing everywhere.
Each team dug in. Meeting invites flew like confetti. People stopped explaining and started defending. Screensharing became a ritual of helplessness. Audit logs were dissected. Flowcharts were redrawn. Emergency calls went out to vendors. Still, nothing worked.
This wasn’t just a glitch. It wasn’t a routine outage. It was the complete, unexplainable failure of one of the largest integrated IT systems in the world. A company known for its flawless backend operation, lauded in case studies, worshipped in enterprise circles, and trusted by governments and Fortune 100s alike—brought to its knees in a single night.
Log files yielded no clues. Servers showed green, but processes refused to sync. Scheduled tasks vanished. Critical data pipelines were frozen. From payroll to procurement, marketing to manufacturing, the arteries of the organization were blocked.
Someone muttered, “We need a root cause, not more screenshots.”
In the corner, a senior infrastructure expert—Jørgen, a quiet Norwegian with three decades in systems—rubbed his temples. He hadn’t spoken in hours. But now, he leaned back in his chair, eyes distant.
“Maybe they shouldn’t have fired him,” he said softly in frustration.
A few heads turned.
“Who?” asked Rina, a site reliability engineer from Kuala Lumpur.
Jørgen didn’t look up. “You know. That guy… the one from Integration Support. Quiet. Never escalated anything. But things just… worked when he was around.”
There was silence. Then someone murmured, “Oh—Ravi?”
Yes. Ravi.
The man who had kept the weird glue logic functioning. The undocumented exception handler. The person who connected what no one else bothered to understand.
But he was gone.
Four Weeks Earlier
Ravi had always been the last to arrive but also the last to leave. His cubicle—tucked away on Level 11, near the server access room—was modest, half-filled with mechanical pencils and handwritten notes. No fanfare, no corporate lingo, no LinkedIn thought leadership posts. Just quiet diligence.
He wasn’t flashy. He didn’t have a booming voice or a confident swagger. But his code? Impeccable. He knew the invisible plumbing of the system better than anyone—not because someone asked him to, but because he cared.
But caring wasn’t enough.
Ravi’s manager, Parth, had slowly begun reshaping the team. It started subtly—reassignments, new hires, more meetings held in closed rooms. Ravi had sensed the shift. The team lunches grew quieter. Messages went unanswered. His responsibilities were diluted. And then, one rainy Thursday, the calendar invite came: "1:1 – Parth and HR."
Ravi sat across from them, a beige folder on the table.
“It’s not performance, Ravi,” Parth had said, not meeting his eyes. “This is just about... synergy. Team fit. We were also given your name on the table - seems the work you do does might undergo significant change in the future for automation”
“I see,” Ravi had replied quietly.
“You’ve been a valuable asset,” the HR rep chimed in. “But we’re moving toward a new model.”
They offered him a severance package. A modest one. It was wrapped in generic gratitude and carefully-worded legalese.
Ravi didn’t argue. He packed his things in silence. On his way out, he stopped at the vending machine in the basement, bought a bottle of water, and stood for a long moment looking at the flickering floor directory.
No one saw him leave.
Back to the Present
“They called him useless,” Jørgen continued. “Said he wasn’t strategic enough. Not agile. Not dynamic.”
“Wasn’t he the one who handled cross-system workflows with all the other guys bridging and connecting them?” asked another engineer.
“Yes. And undocumented interfaces. And those ‘one-off’ edge cases that magically worked somehow.” He looked up now. “He kept the weird stuff running. The glue.”
Now the pieces began falling into place. That strange workflow with the finance engine? The odd script that adjusted daylight savings time for five continents in one sweep? The failover config that no one could find in the wiki?
Yep ! All Ravi.
Everyone had assumed these things just ran. They didn’t know they were held together by a man who had no audience, no clout, and apparently, no protection.
Meanwhile, Ravi
Ravi wasn’t watching the news. He had spent his days reading, walking along the lake, and re-learning the art of doing nothing. For the first time in years, his shoulders felt light. He didn’t miss the politics. He didn’t miss pretending.
A former colleague messaged him: “Dude… I think they finally realized what you were doing. Whole thing’s crashed. Total chaos.”
Ravi smiled, but said nothing. He knew this would happen - but he just wanted to be alone. Not because he wanted revenge, but because systems that ignore people eventually implode.
The boss never took back what he cast aside. Fueled by ego and a hunger to stay in control, he watched everything unfold—hidden behind the very people he’d positioned in the field.
Unable—or unwilling—to grasp the lesson Karma was already delivering.
He viewed his team through a biased lens, quick to define an inner circle.
To him, everyone else was just a commodity: used, then discarded—unless they belonged to his chosen few.Not every stone is visible. Some lie buried beneath the wall, unglamorous and unacknowledged—but remove them, and everything falls.
Value isn’t always loud. It doesn’t always speak in strategy decks or KPI charts. Sometimes, value sits in a quiet cubicle, solving problems no one else even sees.
Until it's too late.
Each conversation devolved into a deeper blame game and misdirection. Meetings stretched for hours without answers. People stopped talking in full sentences—just acronyms, logs, and panic. Senior VPs were roped into war rooms. Directors scrambled to find people who had once worked on now-forgotten scripts.
And still, the systems refused to move.
The irony was bitter. Ravi’s workspace hadn’t even been reassigned yet. His scripts lived on—disjointed, uncommented, custom—but no one knew how they worked. His hand-drawn mind maps had been binned by janitorial staff. His quiet genius had left no one to translate it.
The issue hasn’t gone away. Why? Because it was never about the solution—it was always about protecting vested interests.
Sad - but a reality.
For the senior management or for those who face such issues at the workplace , here is a question for you, what do you think we can do about this, how can we improve the work place.
How do we ensure that every team member, regardless of their position, feels valued and integral to our organization's success?
In what ways might our leadership practices inadvertently overlook the 'tiny stones'—the subtle yet crucial elements—that hold our organizational structure together?
How can we cultivate a culture that identifies and nurtures the often-unseen efforts that are vital to our resilience and growth?
This story may be yet another foot note in the wiki of ‘Advancing towards automating workflow without proper coverage of ownership’
This is a powerful and poignant narrative—one that resonates deeply in today’s VUCA world. Ravi’s story is not just about a system failure; it’s about the failure of recognition and organizational empathy. “Whose problem is it?” Nobody knows. Every finger points elsewhere. The lack of clarity is total and it tells the issue of Ambiguity. Interwoven systems, undocumented dependencies, all coexisting in a fragile balance shows the complexity of the model.
As a senior manager, one has to create a culture of recognition beyond visibility—acknowledge behind-the-scenes work, foster psychological safety, and implement peer feedback mechanisms to value contributions from all levels. One should keep in mind that “Value isn’t always loud.”
This issue stems by prioritizing optics, short-term metrics, and centralization, which leads to them missing those who maintain critical systems quietly.