The workaround became the job

The process on paper and the process in practice

Every company runs on hundreds of workarounds. The process on paper has three steps. The process in practice winds through an email chain, a spreadsheet only one person understands, copy and paste between two systems, a WhatsApp to Markus because he’s the only one who knows, and a report rebuilt by hand every Friday.

On paperIn practice

1. Email chain
2. The spreadsheet one person understands
3. Copy and paste between systems
4. WhatsApp to Markus, because he just knows
5. Rebuilt by hand every Friday

Leaders cannot see these paths, and no system records them. They live in people’s heads, inboxes and habits.

Why nobody sees it

Everyone sees their own slice; nobody sees the pattern. The person rebuilding the Friday report knows it takes three hours, but not that four colleagues rebuild versions of the same report. The process map on the wall shows the official path, not the detours. Consultant interviews capture what people remember to mention, which is rarely the copy-paste they no longer notice.

In one illustrative case, a team documented its procurement process as 12 steps. Watched doing the real work, it took 47, including three unofficial spreadsheets, two WhatsApp groups and calling Markus “because he just knows.” The gap between the process on paper and the process in practice is where most AI initiatives die, because they are designed for the paper version.

The solution no vendor will ever build for you

Off-the-shelf software has always served the work every company does the same way: email, calendars, video calls, payroll. The bigger share of work is specific to each company: its processes, its exceptions, its tribal knowledge, its scattered data. We describe this as roughly 20% shared and 80% specific. The exact split varies, but the point holds. Even CRM and ERP prove the point: the core is standard, but making them fit how a business really works has taken armies of consultants and engineers, and the workarounds still grow around them.

Shared work ≈ 20%

Email, calendars, video calls, payroll: work every company does the same way. Off-the-shelf software fits it.

Your work ≈ 80%

Your process, your exceptions, your know-how. Most of what slows you down. A solution that fits it was never worth building for a market of one.

Now the people who know that work can build the solution.

That work stays manual, and you pay for it twice: once in the drag, and again in consultants, backlogs and software that never quite fit or never got used.

At home, too

The same is true outside work. The family calendar that lives in a parent’s head. Medications, appointments and insurance letters for an aging parent. The freelancer’s invoices. The project that keeps getting postponed. Nobody sells software for your life’s 80% either.

Why it stayed that way

Fixing that work used to mean a game of telephone. The person who understands the problem writes a ticket, a project manager translates it, an architect re-scopes it, a consultant builds it, and months later what comes back is a different solution to a different problem, with half the context lost along the way. For most problems, explaining them cost more than living with them.

Try this: list three workarounds you do every week. Then ask whether you would ever have gotten budget to fix any of them. Until recently, the honest answer was no. Then building a fix got far cheaper.

Next: The person with the problem can now build the fix.