ACT II: THE MACHINE — How the system works (or doesn't)
I can tolerate this once, twice, even three times. The fourth time, I lose my cool.
No process engineering (in the broad sense of the term), no project managers specialising in project management, no planning, no sufficient number of staff (to prevent this from happening) can stop the impulse to do things like lunatics and like shit (I emphasise this last part, but I don't want to dwell on the results).
For some reason I genuinely don't understand empirically, there's a huge number of people who have a tendency to demand absurd response times for any normal work process.
It's as if someone planted in their heads the idea that doing something that should take 1 day under normal conditions in 2 hours is fantastic and something to be proud of (mind you—it is, but as an exception).
Surely this is the responsibility of superiors who, faced with this astonishing result, rewarded the behaviour and encouraged it, creating in people the idea that it must be repeated again and again because it's great (mind you, some business models practically depend on this premise to function).
This situation even manifests in body language. These people can be seen in offices walking at 300km/h, always swamped. You ask them: "Got 5 minutes?" They respond: "I'm totally swamped... go on, tell me quick." You come to ask them for something, you ask: "When do you need it by?" They respond: "Yesterday."
Personally, when I find myself in these situations, I ask myself:
- If what you're asking me today was needed yesterday, isn't it possible you dropped the ball and had it sitting around doing nothing?
- What happened to all that stuff about planning?
- Yes, I understand, it's a one-off situation, but... yesterday was a one-off, the day before was too, and last week it happened twice...?
Then comes the classic response:
"No... the thing is, the Client wants..."
Here's where things turn to shit and it gets complicated. Because to you (if any exist) Manager/Middle Manager, I say: I understand, and on this one I can play on your team. And to you (and me)—workers without authority to delegate—I say: here we need to face the fact that when the one demanding we break pre-established timelines (careful—are they even established?) is the one who pays the salaries... ultimately (more or less filtered) the Client, there's not much way out.
What I'm trying to reflect on is that someone needs to tell those people who always want everything yesterday and are always running at a thousand miles an hour—or they need to tell themselves: "Shit, this can't go on... I must be doing something wrong."
And if the scenario is the worst of all, when you tell me about work, give me the real story and say: "Look, here we work flat out, we need to go at 3000km/h because the business requires it, we can't plan because neither we nor the Client wants to—do everything now, however you can, but do it." (?)
The Taleb Connection
The "I need it yesterday" loop has a specific shape. Upstream, the manager or the client demands a response time that's incompatible with the process. The manager delivers that response time — by passing the incompatibility down. From outside, the manager looks responsive; from inside, the worker is absorbing the gap.
"The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile (2012), Book VII, Ch. 23
That's the rule the loop violates. The manager keeps the upside — appearing fast, being praised by the client — while the cost of being fast lands on the worker, in the form of impossible trade-offs, foreseeable mistakes, and burnout. The worker's signature on the work doesn't guarantee they had the time to do it right; it just guarantees they had the deadline.
The honest version of the business model would say so out loud. The article's closing fantasy — just tell me you can't plan, and that's the system — is the act of putting the fragility back where it belongs: visible, named, owned by the people who chose it. The bullshit isn't the urgency. It's pretending the urgency is exceptional when it's actually the operating model.
This article was translated from the 2012 Spanish original and revised in 2026 through human-AI collaboration—clarifying transitions and adding connections to Nassim Taleb's framework.