Searching for Salt
Section VIII · CROSS-CUTTING PLAYBOOKS: THE COMPOUNDING CONSPIRACY · The Compounding Conspiracy
The Mechanism
Every six months, assemble people who interact with your system but are not invested in its narrative, and ask them one question: what is getting slightly worse here that nobody is talking about? The emphasis is on *slightly*. Dramatic failures announce themselves. The ones that destroy you move too slowly to trigger alarm.
The Story
The salt that destroyed the Sumerian Empire accumulated across centuries of irrigation, each season depositing an imperceptible layer that individually meant nothing and cumulatively meant extinction. Hastings watched talent density decline at Pure Software without noticing until the company was unsalvageable. A company that hires one mediocre person this quarter has made a negligible decision. A company that hires one mediocre person every quarter for five years has degraded its standards in a way that no single hire caused and no single intervention can fix.
Application Scenarios
Culture quality and hiring standards.
The Sumerian Audit does not ask whether salt is accumulating. It assumes salt is always accumulating. It asks where. Every six months, pull the resumes of your last twenty hires and compare them to the resumes of the twenty people hired two years before that. Score both cohorts against the same rubric your best operators would use (not the rubric HR uses, which optimizes for defensibility rather than quality). If the recent cohort scores measurably lower on any dimension, you have found the salt. The individual hiring decisions that produced it were each defensible. "She was the best available candidate." "We needed to fill the seat." "He had good references." None of these decisions was wrong. The accumulation of forty such decisions over two years produced a workforce that the founders would not recognize and that the current managers have stopped comparing against the original standard.
Technical debt, process overhead, and standard erosion.
Assemble a group of three to five people who interact with your system but are not invested in its narrative: recent hires, customers, vendors, or advisors. Ask them one question: "What is getting slightly worse here that nobody is talking about?" The emphasis is on *slightly*. Dramatic failures announce themselves. The salt that destroys you moves too slowly to trigger alarm. A specific format that works: give each participant a private written survey with three questions. "What was better about this organization six months ago?" "What small thing have you noticed declining that you have not mentioned because it seems too minor?" "If this trend continued for five more years, what would be broken?" The third question is the Sumerian extrapolation: it forces participants to trace the current rate of degradation forward to its logical conclusion, which is usually alarming enough to justify immediate attention.
Critical Warning
The Sumerians understood irrigation. They irrigated themselves to death.