Every organization I diagnose has workarounds. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the workarounds have been there so long they’ve become invisible. They look like process. They feel like “how we do things.” Nobody questions them because nobody remembers they’re workarounds.
How it starts
Someone hits a structural problem. Maybe the handoff between product and engineering is broken. Maybe the approval process takes three weeks. Maybe the CTO and VP of Product can’t agree on prioritization. Whatever it is, the team adapts. They find a way around it.
This is rational. This is what smart people do. The workaround solves the immediate pain and everyone moves on.
How it compounds
Six months later, the workaround has been absorbed into the process. New hires learn it as “the way things work.” Nobody tells them it’s a patch — because the people who implemented it have either moved on or forgotten the original problem.
Now the organization has a process that’s shaped by a dysfunction nobody is treating. And the workaround itself introduces new constraints. Other teams adapt to those constraints with their own workarounds. The layers accumulate.
What you end up with is an organization that’s been shaped more by its failures than by its intentions. The process map reflects years of adaptation to dysfunction, not a deliberate design.
Why it’s hard to see
The adaptation trap is invisible from inside the organization. Every individual process step makes sense in context. The people doing the work can explain why they do what they do. The problem isn’t at the level of any single step — it’s at the level of the whole system.
From outside, the pattern is obvious. There’s a cluster of workarounds all pointing at the same structural failure. Fix the failure and half the workarounds become unnecessary. But you can’t see the cluster if you’re inside one of its nodes.
What I do with this
When I diagnose an organization, I map the workarounds first. Not the official process — the actual process. What people really do, not what the handbook says they do. The gap between official and actual is the diagnostic signal.
The workarounds point at the structural failures. Fix the failures, and the organization can drop the accumulated adaptations and operate from intention rather than from accumulated scar tissue.
This is uncomfortable work. It means admitting that the thing you’ve been calling a process is actually a coping mechanism. But it’s the only way to stop building on top of dysfunction.