Entangled Work
The Confusion Tax and the Leadership Load
Modern organisations often describe their pressure as pace, complexity, transformation, collaboration, or leadership challenge.
At one level, this description is clearly true. Organisations are faster, more connected, more exposed, more distributed, and more dependent on people who can work across boundaries. The old fantasy of tidy hierarchy has become a ghost in the machine: still invoked, rarely sufficient, and occasionally asked to chair the meeting.
We’d argue that the problem is more specific.
The work has stopped sorting itself properly.
Delivery issues arrive wrapped in stakeholder anxiety.
Change work gets added to routines already full of ordinary obligations.
Meetings become places where people try to manage performance, reassurance, alignment, risk, and redesign all at once.
Reliable people become shock absorbers.
Responsive people become emotional infrastructure.
Transformation becomes one more layer of work, wearing better clothes.
Stefan Norrvall calls this Confusion Tax: the hidden cost of work that has not been clearly distinguished, ranked, or coordinated. I agree with Stefan’s argument that there are ways to design organisations to reduce this tax. But that’s a subject for another time. What I want to explore here is the impact the Confusion Tax has in organsiations lackign the requisite design, which, let’s face it, is most of them, on the people being asked to do the work.
Specifically, the people performing leadership roles in the coordinating middle - reporting upwards, working laterally with peers, and leading others below them.
The question I want us to sit with is simple:
When does leadership become the polite name for the coordinating middle paying the organisation’s Confusion Tax?
The visible problem is not always the real problem
In many organisations, the first explanation arrives too quickly.
A delay becomes an execution issue.
A recurring handoff problem becomes a communication issue.
A stakeholder conflict becomes a relationship issue.
A failed adoption effort becomes a resistance issue.
A tired leader becomes a resilience issue.
A confused role becomes a capability gap.
These explanations may not be entirely wrong. That is what makes them dangerous. There may be execution problems. Communication may be weak. Stakeholders may need managing. People may need more resilience. Some leaders really do need to grow.
But such explanations arrive before a more basic question has been asked:
What kind of work is this?
Until that question is answered, organisations can become very efficient at treating symptoms.
More reporting is added to solve unclear accountability.
More meetings are created to solve coordination strain.
More support language is introduced for people carrying badly sorted work.
More ownership is demanded from roles that have been handed responsibility without matching authority, capacity, or design.
Most of this sounds sensible in isolation. That is the core of the problem. Each response can be reasonable while the cumulative effect becomes absurd. The system appears to be managing the issue. In reality, it is charging capable people to keep things manageable.
That is Confusion Tax.
It is paid in extra meetings, duplicated reporting, repeated clarification, side-channel repair, informal translation, emotional smoothing, and work about the work.
It is paid in the small compensations that keep formal structure looking more coherent than it is.
It is paid by people close enough to reality to know what is happening, and trusted enough to absorb what others would rather not name.
A useful distinction
For this essay, we will use three simple distinctions: Run, Serve, and Change.
Run is continuity work. It keeps promises. It protects reliability. It maintains standards, rhythm, compliance, quality, and delivery. Run is what prevents ordinary obligations from degrading into apology. It is often treated as routine, which is a mistake. In serious organisations, routine is not trivial. It is how trust becomes operational.
Serve is integration work. It makes the organisation responsive to real contexts. It translates, repairs, adjusts, reassures, interprets, negotiates, and holds interfaces together. It lives between centre and country, commercial and operations, policy and practice, promise and delivery, senior intention and local reality. It is often undercounted because, when done well, it leaves traces rather than monuments: a relationship intact, a conflict softened, a handoff made workable, an exception handled before escalation.
Change is adaptation work. It redesigns what the current arrangement can no longer carry. It experiments, renews, learns, and alters capacity. Serious Change is not the same as novelty, innovation theatre, or a more impressive deck about the future. Serious Change asks whether the current arrangement of work, authority, capability, technology, and responsibility can still hold under emerging conditions.
All three are necessary. Real work is always mixed. A single meeting may contain all three. A single leadership role certainly does. That’s not goign to change anytime soon.
The problem is unmanaged mixture. Run, Serve, and Change become expensive when they are loaded onto the same people, forums, and rhythms as though they were one thing.
Three failure signatures
When work stops sorting itself, three patterns often appear.
First, Run gets overloaded.
Reliable work becomes spare capacity. Because a team has not yet failed, the organisation assumes it can absorb more.
A process that already carries ordinary delivery is asked to absorb new reporting.
A manager who already protects standards is asked to become more strategic, more collaborative, more responsive, and more comfortable with ambiguity.
A delivery meeting becomes part status update, part stakeholder reassurance, part political alignment, part change checkpoint.
The meeting still has an agenda. It still produces actions. It still looks like governance. But underneath, Run is no longer being allowed to do its own work cleanly.
Second, Serve becomes invisible.
The organisation relies on translation, repair, expectation management, emotional labour, and stakeholder care while pretending formal structures are working as designed.
Someone is “good with stakeholders.”
Someone “knows how to smooth things.”
Someone “just has the relationships.”
These phrases may be true, but they can also be lazy. They turn work into temperament.
When Serve is invisible, the system begins to mistake informal repair for formal coherence.
Third, Change gets misloaded.
Change often arrives wearing better clothes than Run and Serve. Run sounds like maintenance. Serve sounds like support. Change sounds like the future. It comes with strategy language, executive sponsorship, roadmaps, target states, maturity curves, town halls, and compulsory optimism.
But by the time Change reaches the people who must carry it, it may feel less like meaningful transformation and more like another workstream, another platform, another adoption target, another governance rhythm, another reporting requirement, and another request for local champions.
People can support the intent of Change and still dread its arrival. That does not automatically make them resistant. It may mean they are experienced enough to know how the future usually enters: as more work, more ambiguity, and more responsibility for making senior aspiration locally survivable.
The burden travels
Badly sorted work does not stay politely inside process maps.
It travels.
It travels into meetings, where one conversation is asked to manage delivery, reassure stakeholders, and advance transformation all at once.
It travels into dashboards and reporting, where activity becomes visible without becoming intelligible.
It travels into development conversations, where structurally confused work becomes feedback about resilience, confidence, ownership, or maturity.
Most importantly, it travels into leadership roles.
The organisation may speak as though the work has been allocated. Charts exist. Accountabilities exist. Forums exist. Dashboards exist. Milestones exist. Yet unresolved work keeps arriving at the same human locations: people close enough to reality to know what is happening, senior enough to be expected to do something about it, and trusted enough to absorb the blur.
This is where Confusion Tax becomes leadership load.
Leaders in the coordinating middle carry that load in three directions.
Upward, they make the situation credible enough for senior leaders to trust. This usually requires compression: owner, risk, decision, next step. The danger is that reality becomes too tidy to travel.
Laterally, they make the situation workable enough for peers and adjacent functions to cooperate. This requires reciprocity, fairness, negotiation, and respect for other people’s constraints. The danger is endless pre-alignment, where cooperation is maintained by refusing to name the real trade-off.
Downward, they make the situation liveable enough for teams to keep carrying. This requires clarity, protection, sequencing, meaning, and a believable account of what people are being asked to do. The danger is making work sound more inhabitable than it is.
From the outside, this can look like leadership capability.
Responsive. Trusted. Good with ambiguity. Able to bring people along. Close to the work. Useful across levels.
Sometimes, it is leadership capability.
But more often it is something else: the organisation rewarding people for absorbing incoherence.
Things to reflect on
If the above feels like your lived experience, here are a few things to think about that you might find useful.
Before asking whether people are leading well, ask whether the work has been distinguished clearly enough to carry.
Before asking for more ownership, ask whether responsibility, authority, capacity, and design line up.
Before asking for more resilience, ask what load is being normalised.
Before celebrating transformation, ask what has stopped, what has been protected, and who is paying.
Once you’ve though through this, ask yourself three clear questions.
First:
Where is Confusion Tax being paid, and what does the organisation usually call it?
Second:
Where are Run, Serve, and Change being treated as one thing?
Third:
When does the carrying of badly sorted work become leadership, and when does it become Confusion Tax?
The distinction will not be clean. It should not be. Leadership does involve carrying. The answer is not to refuse every burden that is unfair, ambiguous, or under-designed. That would make leadership wonderfully pure and mostly useless.
But neither should leadership become the hiding place for work the system refuses to sort.
If you’d like to come and discuss this in a like-spirited group, sign up for our Dialogic sessions - 12 May 2026 and 14/15 May 2026.