Single point of failure

with the right knowledge, perspective and support, it can be the most rewarding step you'll ever take.

When the unthinkable happened for my next guest, not only did it shake her family to its core, but it also exposed her clinic as having a single point of failure, herself.

Emily was the founder and managing director of Active Step Healthcare, a private podiatry practice she had created in 2011.

All was going well.

And then once we'd recovered it and we'd realised the missing ingredients and actually what does make a thriving healthcare practice run without you, I rewrote the book.

And

what allowed that to happen? Was it a lack of experience, lack of training around how to run businesses for healthcare professionals? What do you think led to you being the single point of failure in your business?

I think it was the fact that I truly believed that as long as you had all your systems and your processes in place, that the business would run.

In Aurelia, the absolute rule is gravity and the technological system designed to defy it.

Just like in Starborn, the leadership has become so complacent, so completely reliant on the perfection of their core, that they've built a society with a single point of failure and absolutely no backup parachute.

And that leads perfectly into how the sabotage actually happens, especially when we look back at Starborn.

The whisper campaign.

Yes.

The ether core, the mechanical heart keeping this entire sprawling metropolis in the sky, is sputtering and failing.

The single point of failure we discussed earlier with normal accident theory? The system was meticulously designed to run the city, but it was never designed with a backup plan for the core stopping entirely.

And the true terror of it is that the other racers are completely blind to it.

This makes it difficult to determine if resources are being used efficiently and effectively.

Single Point of Failure and Continuity Risk When I read this one, this is when I knew, like, okay, I have to read this report to you guys.

All right, here it is.

Again, single point of failure and continuity risk.

All important know-how and information about the program is kept only in the minds of those attending the meetings.

If key members leave, the postal service could lose valuable operational knowledge, impacting its ability to continue the program smoothly.

Could we not look at it together in a communal type way? So it's...

The beauty of going through that process is saying, what's worked so far? What are the bits that, you mean, have potentially got a bit clunky or we've started repeating? And also a biggie is what information is sat with particular people? And I'll wang on about this all day, but it's that SPOF thing, single points of failure.

And I think you don't realise as you grow in a business how much info is just sat in people's heads.

um and you mean they're great heads and they are you mean valuable parts of your business but if you want to scale people need to know that stuff that that information needs to be locked down it needs to be owned by the business not by the people in it necessarily so it's it's getting that continuity of information to flow through a business and i think that's that comes at a point you mean and i think on reflection in the businesses that I've been in, that's sometimes been the blocker that there's been, it's bottlenecked around particular people, be that the founder, be that the operations director, it's that they know what they're doing and they haven't necessarily disseminated that knowledge and information to the rest of the team.