You’d expect process breakdowns to come from the careless, the junior, the people who never really understood the system in the first place.
That’s not what actually happens.
At a creative agency, project managers and account directors know the process best. Under a tight deadline, they’re also the ones most likely to break it — hovering over creative work, demanding to know why a task is taking so long, with zero grasp of the actual problem the designer is solving in that moment.
Control creeps into work that specifically needed freedom to function.
The reverse happens just as often. The same manager, buried in admin work under the same deadline pressure, forgets to pass along the one detail that lets billing invoice a client on time.
Six months later, someone’s chasing an invoice that should have gone out immediately.
Freedom — or just overload — creeps into work that specifically needed discipline.
Same person. Same deadline. Two opposite failures, both caused by the identical thing: pressure.
Complex, creative work needs freedom to adapt. Routine, transactional work needs rules to run cleanly.
Most of the time, an organization can hold that split just fine — clear process for sequencing, real autonomy for execution.
Pressure erodes the boundary. Not because anyone forgets which mode applies where.
Because a person under enough stress reverts to whatever feels safest in the moment, and that instinct doesn’t check which mode the task actually needed first.
The honest fix isn’t glamorous. Clearer boundaries and better-defined roles help, genuinely.
Building in slack ahead of time helps more — extra capacity, redundancy, the thing Carolyn Dewar calls choosing what stays stable and what stays agile before the crisis hits.
Most organizations can’t afford that, most of the time.
So the real answer, more often than not, is narrower and less satisfying: control what you can control, tighten the process discipline you already have, and treat redundancy as a genuine advantage rather than something you get to plan around in advance.
The people breaking your process under pressure aren’t the ones who don’t understand it. They’re the ones who understand it best, and temporarily can’t afford to follow it.