When it failed, they sent more bosses.

A job is behind. You can see it isn't going to be finished when it was supposed to be. So you put more people on it.

Everybody does this. It feels like the only lever you have, and it is almost always the wrong one — but wrong in a way that takes years to notice. Here is what it looks like when you can see the whole thing happen in two days.

I had a contract to replace the entire water, drainage and heating system in a block of flats. Three staircases. Most of it was ordinary work.

The small part was the connection to the local network. Three pipes, three inches across, about four metres of each. To reach them you had to break through the building's foundation and dig down two metres.

That connection had been sitting in a dispute for years. The residents said the pipes belonged to the utility company. The utility company said they belonged to the building. Nobody had touched them while the argument went on.

Eventually I was given the go-ahead.

Two plumbers and a welder. We cleaned the pipes, cut out one of the three and replaced it. About two hours.

I want to be clear that this was not skilled work. It was three men doing a straightforward job in the order it needed doing. Any competent crew would have done the same.

Then the utility company arrived and issued a stop order.

Not because the work was wrong. Because the pipes were theirs — and if the pipes were theirs then the work was theirs, and that had just been settled in their favour by watching somebody else start it.

So we stopped, and waited.

The next morning they sent twelve men. Six plumbers. One foreman. One driver. Two labourers. Two managers.

They worked eight hours on two pipes. At the end of the day, nothing had been replaced.

The morning after that, they came back with eighteen.

The six plumbers had become eight. The two managers had become five. There was an extra driver.

They worked another eight hours. This time the pipes were connected, and the joints leaked like a fountain.

Read those two days again and notice what changed between them.

The job had failed. The response was to add six people. Of those six, three were managers and two were plumbers.

Faced with its own failure, the organisation added more supervision than skill.

Not out of stupidity. Because supervision is the only thing an organisation can add without anybody having to say out loud what the actual problem was. Adding a manager is a decision somebody can sign. Admitting that the men on site couldn't do the job is a conversation nobody wants to have, and it has consequences for whoever hired them.

The arithmetic, since it's the part nobody ever runs.

Three men, two hours, one pipe replaced. Six man-hours.

Twelve men for eight hours, then eighteen men for eight hours. Two hundred and forty man-hours, and at the end of it, joints that had to come out again.

Forty times the labour. A worse result.

And not one minute of it appeared as a cost anywhere. The men were on salary. They were going to be paid whether they stood at that block or somewhere else. The whole thing shows up in nobody's accounts, which is exactly why it can happen twice in two days and nobody stops it.

Here's who paid.

Three staircases of people went four days without hot water and without heating. It was the start of the cold season.

They had no part in any of this. They didn't own the pipes, they hadn't started the argument, and most of them had no idea there was one. They had a plumber on site doing the work, and then they didn't, and nobody explained why.

From inside those flats it looked like incompetence. It wasn't. Every person involved did exactly what their position required. The utility company protected an asset it believed was its own. The managers followed a procedure. The plumbers did as they were told.

An organisation chart decided who was allowed to hold a blowtorch, and three staircases went cold for four days.

I'm not writing this about a utility company. You don't run one and neither do I.

I'm writing it because the same instinct sits in every firm I've worked in, mine included, and in a small business it's cheaper but it isn't different.

A job starts slipping. You go to site yourself to see what's happening. Then you ask the foreman for a call at the end of each day. Then you put someone on it to coordinate. Three weeks later there are four people involved in that job who have never laid a hand on it, and the job is still slipping.

None of them are doing anything wrong. Every one of those steps was reasonable on the day you took it. And not one of them added an hour of work to the job.

The question underneath all of it is one most owners have never answered with an actual number:

Of the people you pay, how many produce what the company sells — and how many are paid out of what those people produce?

You can feel the answer. Feeling it is not the same as knowing it, and the ratio moves quietly, one reasonable decision at a time, until a business that was making money isn't.