Zašto 'Mi ćemo to riješiti' nikad ne skalira

In most small businesses, there’s a phrase that gets used constantly: “We’ll just handle it.”

It sounds reasonable. Flexible, even. The team is small. Everyone knows what’s going on. Why build process around something you can just… handle?

The problem is what “handle it” actually means.

It means someone will remember. Someone will follow up. Someone will notice when something’s wrong. Someone will catch the error before it reaches the client. Someone will know the context that isn’t written down anywhere.

“We’ll handle it” is a bet that the right person will be available, attentive, and informed at the exact moment they need to be.

That bet fails more often than people admit.

How it starts

Every “we’ll handle it” situation starts reasonably.

A customer has an unusual request. Instead of updating the process, someone handles it. A new edge case appears. Someone handles it. Two systems don’t quite connect. Someone handles the gap manually.

The handling accumulates. Each individual decision makes sense. The total load becomes invisible until it isn’t.

What breaks first

Memory fails. The person who handled the Johnson account forgets that they also need to check the separate spreadsheet. The unusual request from three months ago gets forgotten and repeated incorrectly.

People leave. And when they do, they take their handling with them. All those small decisions, workarounds, and context — gone. The new hire doesn’t know what they don’t know.

Context gets lost. Why do we do it this way? No one remembers. The original reason might not even apply anymore. But the handling continues because that’s how it’s always been done.

Growth dilutes attention. When there were three people, everyone could track everything. At fifteen people, no one can. The handling that worked at small scale becomes a liability at medium scale.

The ownership problem

When everyone handles something, no one owns it.

“We all handle client follow-ups” means follow-ups happen inconsistently. Some clients get excellent attention. Others fall through cracks. The variation isn’t visible until a client complains — or leaves without saying anything.

“We handle that as it comes up” means the response depends entirely on who notices and when they notice. It’s not a process. It’s improvisation that happens to work most of the time.

The most dangerous version: “I handle that.” What happens when that person is sick? On vacation? Leaves the company? The handling doesn’t transfer because it was never documented as handling in the first place.

The invisible cost

Teams that run on handling pay a tax they don’t see.

It’s the meeting to figure out who’s handling the thing that someone thought someone else was handling. It’s the apology email when something got missed. It’s the mental load of remembering what the system doesn’t remember.

It’s also the ceiling on growth. You can only scale to the point where human attention can cover all the handling. Beyond that, things start breaking faster than people can catch them.

Some teams hit this ceiling at 10 people. Some at 25. But everyone hits it eventually.

The simple test

If something needs handling more than twice, it needs a system.

Not a complex system. Not enterprise software. Sometimes a checklist. Sometimes a recurring reminder. Sometimes a simple rule that everyone follows.

The bar for “system” is low. It just needs to work without depending on someone’s memory, attention, or presence.

The shift

The shift isn’t about removing flexibility. It’s about knowing what requires flexibility and what doesn’t.

Some things genuinely need human judgment. Those should stay handled.

Most things don’t. They’re repeatable. They’re predictable. They just feel like they need handling because no one has spent thirty minutes turning them into a process.

The question isn’t whether to handle things. It’s whether you’re handling things that shouldn’t require handling in the first place.

Deep Dive: When Systems Are the Right Answer — Understanding where systematic approaches create the most value