Invisible work is something my six-year-old son, Brando, knows nothing about. He has a shelf full of Lego Speed Champions cars which, according to him, have never broken down once in the two years he’s had them. Even though I’ve had to rebuild that yellow Lamborghini three times—once on my hands and knees searching the rug at 11 p.m. for a single black 1 to 1 tile and muttering under my breath about why a toy car needs a billion pieces—Brando remembers none of this. In his eyes, the cars are completely indestructible. “They never break,” he told me last week, taking the statement with total gravity, while a single peg held on the rear spoiler on the McLaren.
I laughed, and at the same time I felt that little, particular pain every parent knows—the actual work had been going on unseen, so the child came to the exact opposite conclusion from the truth. Instead of thinking “my father keeps repairing these cars”, he believed “these cars are unbreakable”. The care had vanished so entirely into the result that it was taken for a fundamental fact about the world.
The electric light and the telephone are network systems whose function is to be entirely invisible until they fail.
McLuhan, M. (1964)
I’ve kept going over that moment because I see the same thing play out at work. The launch proceeds without a hitch, and no one asks about the quiet renegotiations behind the scenes. When a designer gets a smooth stakeholder review, they assume the stakeholders were just in a good mood, not realising someone spent two days running pre-briefs and removing the riskiest slide before the meeting even started. Like the best kind of parenting, good leadership often looks like doing nothing at all.
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When Smooth Operations Hide Invisible Work
It’s intentional. When governance works, the friction vanishes before the team has a chance to notice. When underlying systems function properly, nobody sends a message saying, “Tremendous work on that component architecture!” Teams execute projects in half the time, cut waste, and keep moving.
As a design manager, like with my son, I build a shield around the team so they can focus on craft, not corporate politics. But a proper muddle sits at the heart of this: when you remove friction silently, the wider business stops allocating time or resources to the mechanics that keep things smooth. They take the calm for granted.
The Strategic Trap of Invisible Delivery and Unseen Effort
Delivery without visibility is a structural trap. When your invisible work stays completely hidden, high standards start to feel like arbitrary gatekeeping rather than helpful guidance, simply because no one saw the groundwork.
If you enforce rules or block non-standard requests without bringing stakeholders into the context, people see an obstacle. They don’t see the weeks of technical rework or wasted budget you just saved them from down the line. They think you’re being bloody difficult. Strategic influence at this level isn’t built by just being right; it’s built by ensuring your standards are experienced as enabling rather than restrictive.
Making Invisible Work Visible: Show the Scaffolding First
I am on a learning path that tells me that the answer isn’t to start blowing your own trumpet or recounting every fire you’ve put out upstream. That gets tiresome fast. What actually works is two things: bringing stakeholders into the strategic reasoning before you remove the friction, and actively noticing the invisible work in others.
Show the scaffolding before you take it down. Explain the trade-offs early so partners understand governance protects decision velocity, not slows it down. And point out the quiet win in your team: “I know you talked the partner out of that scope change without making a scene—that saved us weeks of rework.”
I aim to keep Brando’s illusion about his Lego cars alive and kicking. A six-year-old needs to believe some things in his world are simply solid. But at work, I’ve come to terms with going unseen. Being invisible isn’t a failure of the work; most of the time, it’s proof that it worked.
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The stratospheric stuff I should have read, listened to, or watched a long time ago.
The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
Org Design for Design Orgs by Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner
Turn the Ship Around! by L. David Marquet
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