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The workaround census
Your real process is the one nobody wrote down.
Every operations team runs two processes: the documented one, and the real one. The real one is held together by workarounds — the spreadsheet that shadows the system of record, the Slack message that substitutes for a handoff, the one person who knows to double-check step four.
Workarounds are invisible in org charts and absent from process docs, but they're where the actual work lives. Each one was a sensible local fix to a real problem. Collectively, they're process debt: every new hire learns them by apprenticeship, every absence breaks something, and nobody can say with confidence how an order actually flows.
Here's a revealing exercise: ask three people to describe the same process and count the steps that appear in only one version. That count is your debt.
Tomorrow: the tempting fix that makes this worse — automation.