Why Workarounds Become Permanent

Almost every organization has a process that works differently in practice than it does on paper.

There is the formal process.

And then there is the way people know the work actually gets done.

An approval is bypassed because it takes too long. A spreadsheet fills a gap between two systems. Information is shared through an unofficial channel because the formal one does not reach the right people. Several steps in a process are routinely skipped because the people doing the work no longer see their value.

We tend to describe these adaptations as workarounds.

The word itself can sound negative, as though the existence of a workaround means someone is failing to follow the process correctly.

But sometimes the workaround is telling us something else.

Perhaps the process no longer reflects the environment in which the work actually occurs.

Workarounds Usually Begin for a Reason

Processes are designed with assumptions.

We assume certain information will be available.

We assume decisions will happen within a reasonable amount of time.

We assume systems will communicate.

We assume dependencies will occur in a particular sequence.

We assume the environment in which the process operates will remain sufficiently similar to the one for which it was designed.

Then the process meets reality.

A customer needs something sooner than expected. A system cannot perform a required step. An approval creates an unnecessary delay. Two functions need information in different ways. A step that once served a purpose no longer appears to add value.

People adapt.

That adaptation is not necessarily evidence of poor discipline.

It may be evidence that the organization has learned something its original design did not anticipate.

The Workaround Can Be Feedback

Good process design should not end when a process is implemented. The process needs some way of telling us whether it works.

Formal measures can provide part of that feedback: cycle times, errors, rework, customer outcomes, delays or exceptions.

But behaviour provides feedback too.

If people repeatedly circumvent the same step, create the same offline tool, seek the same informal approval or develop the same alternative sequence, the pattern itself contains information.

Something is creating friction.

The difficulty is that workarounds are often silent feedback.

They allow the work to continue.

The immediate problem disappears.

The customer receives what they need. The deadline is met. The employee gets the information. The handoff happens.

And because the workaround succeeded, the condition that made it necessary can become less visible.

What Works Locally May Not Work Systemically

There is another complication.

A workaround can be entirely rational for the person or team using it while creating problems elsewhere in the organization.

Imagine a ten-step process.

The team responsible for the early stages discovers that steps one through four add little value to its own work. Over time, people begin moving directly to step five.

Locally, the process has improved.

Work moves faster. Unnecessary effort disappears. The team may even produce better results.

But what if another function depends on information created during step three?

What if step four triggers a system update required downstream?

What if another team cannot begin its work until something that appears unnecessary upstream has occurred?

The workaround has optimized one part of the process while weakening the flow between parts.

Neither team necessarily did anything wrong.

They are experiencing different parts of the same system.

This is why process effectiveness cannot always be evaluated from the perspective of the people performing an individual step.

The relevant question is not only:

Does this work better for us?

It is also:

What happens elsewhere when we work this way?

Temporary Adaptations Can Become the Operating Model

When a workaround works, people tend to repeat it. Other people learn it. New employees are told how things are really done.

Reporting may begin to depend on it. Roles adjust around it. Other processes accommodate it. Technology may even be configured around it.

Eventually, the workaround no longer feels temporary. It is simply part of how the organization operates.

This is one way organizational drift occurs. Not necessarily because anyone made a poor decision, but because reasonable local adaptations accumulated over time. And importantly, the resulting process may actually be better than the original design.

The organizational challenge is not preventing that evolution.

It is noticing that the evolution has occurred.

Making Workarounds Visible

If workarounds contain information about the system, organizations need ways to see them. That does not require treating every deviation as a compliance failure.

Doing so may accomplish the opposite. If people believe identifying a workaround will simply result in being told to follow the original process, they have little reason to surface what they have learned.

Instead, recurring workarounds can become opportunities for inquiry.

Why was the workaround necessary?

What constraint does it solve?

Is that constraint temporary or persistent?

What happens upstream and downstream when the workaround is used?

Does the adaptation improve the process as a whole, or primarily one part of it?

Those questions make it possible to distinguish between a workaround that should disappear and one that has revealed something worth redesigning.

Sometimes the Workaround Points Toward the Solution

Once the underlying friction becomes visible, the appropriate intervention may be very different from simply restoring the original process.

Perhaps a step can be removed.

Perhaps information can be captured differently.

Perhaps two processes need to be better integrated.

Perhaps decision rights need to change.

Perhaps a repetitive activity can be automated.

Increasingly, some of those repetitive activities may be performed or supported by AI.

But the technology is not the starting point.

The starting point is understanding why people found it necessary to work around the process in the first place.

A recurring workaround may reveal exactly where automation could reduce friction. In another situation, it may reveal a governance problem that automation would merely make faster. In another, the process itself may no longer be necessary.

The workaround helps identify the stress point.

Diagnosis determines what to do with it.

The Goal Is Not Perfect Adherence

Organizations are not static systems. Processes encounter changing customers, technologies, people, priorities and constraints. People will adapt to those conditions.

That adaptation is part of how organizations learn.

The goal therefore cannot be to design a process once and expect reality to conform to it indefinitely. Nor is every workaround something to formalize.

The more useful discipline is to remain attentive to the gap between how work was designed to happen and how work actually happens.

Sometimes that gap reveals unnecessary behaviour that should be corrected.

Sometimes it reveals consequences that local teams cannot see.

And sometimes it reveals that the organization has already discovered a better way of working.

The question is whether anyone notices.

Closing Reflection

Consider a workaround that has become normal in your organization.

Rather than beginning with:

How do we get people to follow the process?

Consider asking:

What does this workaround make possible that the existing process does not?

And then:

What happens elsewhere in the system because we work this way?

The answers may tell you whether the workaround is the problem - or whether it has been making another problem visible all along.

---

Related Reading

Why Organizations Become What Nobody Intended: Explore how reasonable local decisions and adaptations accumulate over time, gradually reshaping the organization.

Organizations as Living Systems: Explore why organizations evolve through interaction, adaptation and emergence rather than operating only as they were formally designed.

Related Framework

Organizational Intentionality: Examines how organizations evolve through accumulated decisions and adaptations, and how leaders can periodically examine whether what has emerged should be preserved, reinforced, reconsidered or redesigned.