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Key Takeaways Workarounds often outlive the problem they were created to solve. Once embedded in routines, teams keep using them even after the underlying process improves.
Distributed costs are easy to tolerate. Small amounts of duplicate work, checking and waiting spread across many teams can add up to significant organizational drag without creating an obvious trigger for action.
Keeping the workaround creates many small, ongoing costs, while removing it can expose the organization creates a concentrated, visible downside.
The workaround started for a good reason.
A launch team was struggling with unreliable information moving across several functions. Leadership added a manual tracker and a weekly reconciliation so critical gaps wouldn’t get missed. It wasn’t elegant, but it worked. The launch moved forward, and the immediate problem stopped dominating attention.
Months later, the operating environment had changed. The underlying process was stronger, the information was more reliable, and teams had developed better ways to manage the risk. The tracker stayed, and so did the weekly reconciliation.
People across several functions continued updating the formal system and then checking the workaround because both had become part of how the work moved. Everyone could see the duplication.
What kept it in place wasn’t a belief that the workaround was efficient. The reason was more rational than that. The cost of keeping it was spread across many people. The risk of removing it wasn’t.
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