"Inherited Messes, Invisible Work and Foundational Work"

January brought discussions about work that matters but doesn't show up on any performance review.

Across sessions on everything from change to career transitions to knowledge management, members kept circling back to the same frustration: essential work that stays invisible until something breaks. The most striking evolution in January was how conversations about invisible work shifted from complaint to recognition. 

In early January I hosted a discussion I titled “Inherited Messes & January Reality Checks” without knowing the can of worms I was about to open. We talked about how common it is to be both the person who says “there is a train about to crash!” and the person assigned to “clean up that totally-unpredictable train crash.” — insert collective eye roll.

Last month we started questioning whether making invisible work visible was even the right goal, or whether we'd just be adding "performing the work of explaining our work" to an already impossible load. The conversation moved from "how do we get credit?" to "what if we stopped trying to convince people and just found each other instead?"

Many of the discussions at the Sensemakers Club last month pointed toward the same realization: maybe the problem isn't that our work is invisible, but that we keep working in systems designed not to see it.

Below is a recap of the meta themes that we saw across our discussion sessions in January. If you are interested in our upcoming discussions, check out our discussion group calendar.  

#1 The Emotional Labor Nobody Pays For

The most persistent theme was emotional labor - constant performance of professional presence, absorption of others' anxiety without crossing into therapy territory.

• Facilitators described the energy of being "on" for clients.

• Researchers held space for stakeholder fear.

• Self-compassion discussions revealed how people pour energy into managing others' comfort while their own wells run dry.

• This work keeps everything else working, but gets dismissed as "soft skills."

# 2 The Foundational Work That Only Shows Up When It's Gone

Sessions surfaced frustration with work that only becomes visible through its absence.

• Governance gets dismissed as administrative until systems collapse.
• Thinking on paper feels radical.
• Facilitation structure and user research get treated as optional until something breaks.
• Members cleaning up "inherited messes" were often fixing problems that resulted from someone else not doing this foundational work in the first place.

#3 The Invisible Choices About Whose Work Matters

Perhaps the most insidious invisible work is the constant negotiation of whose priorities get to drive decisions.

• Polls about "inherited messes" revealed how much of what people do isn't actually their choice - responding to someone else's priorities, cleaning up someone else's crisis, working from someone else's framing of "the problem."
• Ethics conversations pushed on how financial incentives determine whose needs get addressed.
• Career transition, and change discussions showed people wrestling with whose story they're living inside.

This work of figuring out who defines the problem, whose perspective matters, whose pain is worth addressing happens constantly but almost never gets named.

For perhaps obvious reasons the name of my information architecture discussion in February is: When the System Can’t Hold the Truth: Burnout as an Information Architecture Problem. This topic was suggested by members, and I can't think of the better follow-up from the vulnerable session we started 2026 with. 

- Abby Covert, Chief Sensemaker