Every organisation has people who seem to know how everything works.
They know which inventory figures need extra verification. They know which reports cannot be trusted without checking another system. They know which process needs an extra approval, which discrepancy needs a phone call, and which spreadsheet holds the numbers that actually matter.
When something goes wrong, management often calls them first. They are experienced, resourceful and dependable.
But their expertise can also make operational weaknesses hard to see.
A process may look reliable because an experienced employee knows how to stop it failing. A report may look accurate because someone reconciles its figures by hand before management sees them. A warehouse may keep meeting its daily commitments because supervisors have built workarounds for recurring system limits.
The operation keeps moving. The underlying problems remain.
This article is for the leader who relies on a few experienced people to keep things running, and who cannot say how much of the operation depends on them.
When a workaround becomes the process
Workarounds are not necessarily bad. In real operating environments, people need to use judgement. Unexpected situations arise, and no process can anticipate every one of them. Experienced people are essential to managing that complexity.
The problem begins when a temporary workaround becomes a permanent operating requirement.
Consider an inventory team that repeatedly exports data into spreadsheets to reconcile recorded stock against physical stock.
This is an illustrative scenario, not an account of any specific company.
The team completes its work every day. Management receives its reports. Orders keep moving. From the outside, the process looks functional.
But several questions remain unanswered. Why does the discrepancy keep occurring? Which record is authoritative? How much time does the reconciliation take? Can management tell whether the reported figures reflect the physical inventory? What happens when the person who does the reconciliation is absent?
The spreadsheet may solve the immediate problem without touching its cause. The same pattern can appear in production reporting, warehouse movements, vehicle management and quality control. A successful workaround can become so familiar that the organisation stops treating the underlying problem as something to solve.
In Your Warehouse Is Automated. So Why Are You Still Flying Blind? we noted that workarounds keep an operation moving and also hide the problem that created them. This article looks at the people who carry those workarounds, and at what the business owes them.
What the research shows, and what it does not
Researchers have studied this pattern in a setting where skilled people compensate for flawed processes every day: hospital nursing.
In a 2003 study in California Management Review, Anita Tucker and Amy Edmondson observed 26 nurses at nine hospitals for 239 hours. They recorded 194 process failures. Most were problems such as missing supplies, missing information or broken equipment. Nurses overwhelmingly fixed the problem in front of them and moved on. The authors call this first-order problem solving. For 93 per cent of the problems, nurses followed the rule of doing what it took to continue the task, no more and no less. Only 7 per cent of their responses did even the minimum needed to start an inquiry into root causes, such as bringing the problem to someone's attention.
The nurses were not careless. The authors describe them as dedicated and capable, and many reported satisfaction when they worked around an obstacle. But the pattern had costs. On average, about 33 minutes per eight-hour shift were lost to coping with failures that could have been addressed and removed. Because each fix stayed isolated, the people responsible for the underlying process rarely learned that it was failing. The authors describe an apparent balance that is illusory: problems appear, skilled people absorb them, and the system never changes.
One further point matters for any operations leader. The authors argue that the "ideal employee" many managers want, someone who handles every problem without bothering anyone, is questionable from the point of view of organisational learning.
The ideal employee who handles every problem without bothering anyone may be the very reason the organisation never learns from its failures.
Now the limits. The study observed nurses in nine hospitals chosen for their reputation for nursing excellence, and it was not designed to be representative. It is not a study of warehouses or factories. The authors suggest the pattern is not unique to hospitals, though it may be stronger there. We cite the study for what it shows about how workarounds behave, not as a measure of any industry. It does not show that every workaround signals a broken process, or that every organisation has this problem.
The hidden cost of relying on individual knowledge
When critical operational knowledge sits mainly in people's heads, the business depends on individuals in ways its performance reports do not show. That dependency can create five risks.
Inconsistent decisions. Two employees may handle the same exception differently, because the real procedure is understood through experience, not clearly defined.
Limited visibility. Management may receive reports that describe the recorded outcome without revealing the manual interventions, delays or exceptions along the way.
Unnecessary effort. People spend time checking, reconciling and correcting information instead of working on productivity and service.
Fragile continuity. When a knowledgeable employee is absent, changes role or leaves, the people taking over may struggle to reproduce the same results.
Misleading improvement initiatives. Management may invest in automation without understanding the manual activity that currently compensates for weaknesses in the process. The new technology can then reproduce those weaknesses instead of removing them. We described this in Why Operational Visibility Must Come Before Automation: automation can amplify a bad process.
None of this means experienced employees are the problem. Quite the opposite. Their ability to keep operations running shows how much value they bring. It can also show how much the organisation depends on their individual effort.
The aim is to preserve their expertise while reducing the dependence on undocumented knowledge and repeated workarounds.
Workarounds are a map
There is a more useful way to look at workarounds. Each one marks a place where the official system failed to give someone what they needed.
In The Operational Mistakes That Keep Complex Businesses Running Below Their Potential we described how people become the integration layer when systems do not connect. Someone makes the call. Someone keeps the spreadsheet. Someone confirms what another system should already know. Mapped properly, those informal practices show where visibility, control or decision-ready information is missing. They are evidence about the system, gathered by the people who felt the gap first.
That is why the right first step is curiosity, not removal. Understand why the workaround exists before deciding what should replace it.
Why adding technology is not always the answer
When management discovers recurring operational problems, the temptation is to introduce another system, dashboard, integration or automation project. Sometimes that is the right decision.
But technology cannot decide whether the underlying process is appropriate, whether the information entering the system is reliable, or whether employees have built workarounds that the proposed solution does not account for.
Imagine automating an inventory process without first understanding why its recorded quantities regularly need manual reconciliation. The organisation could end up processing discrepancies faster while still reporting figures that need extra verification. The system may be operating exactly as designed. The business problem remains.
This is the argument of the video Stop Automating Inefficiencies. Before choosing a technology, management needs to understand how work actually happens, where information originates, which decisions depend on it, and what people do when the intended process fails.
The objective is not to remove human judgement. It is to make routine operations more dependable and improve the quality of information available to decision-makers. That frees experienced people to concentrate on work that genuinely needs their expertise.
Five questions worth asking before the next technology project
1. Which processes depend on one person's knowledge? Identify activities that become difficult when a particular experienced person is unavailable. Check whether the knowledge is documented, shared and supported by a reliable process.
2. Where do people repeatedly leave the official system to finish their work? Look for spreadsheets, manual registers, repeated phone calls and separate reconciliation exercises. Understand why they exist before deciding whether to remove them.
3. Which figures need manual verification before management can trust them? Establish where the information originates, how discrepancies are found and what evidence supports the final reported result.
4. How much effort goes into correcting problems that have already occurred? Examine recurring exceptions, duplicate data entry, repeated approvals and manual corrections. Separate necessary judgement from avoidable rework.
5. What would happen if the people who understand these workarounds were unavailable tomorrow? Consider whether the process would continue reliably, whether someone else could take over, and whether management would keep an accurate view of the operation.
These questions will not diagnose every operational problem. They can expose areas that deserve a closer look before the organisation commits to a technology investment.
From individual workarounds to dependable operations
The answer is not to remove the people who understand the operation. Nor is it to force every activity into a rigid, automated workflow.
It is to understand why those people are needed, which decisions genuinely require their expertise, and which recurring difficulties should be addressed through better processes, more reliable information or appropriate technology. That work may involve clarifying responsibilities, standardising procedures, improving data capture, integrating disconnected systems or introducing automation where the process is well understood.
Sometimes the right decision is to improve an existing system instead of replacing it. Sometimes the process itself needs redesign before any new technology is introduced. The correct response depends on what the operation needs, not on which technology happens to be available.
That is how we approach operational challenges at TENNXT: understand the process, establish where the problem originates, and engineer the solution around the operational requirement. The objective is not technology for its own sake. It is to build operations that are more reliable, more visible and less dependent on people repeatedly compensating for preventable weaknesses.
A final question for operations leaders
Your most experienced employees may be holding more of your operation together than your reports reveal. Their knowledge is an asset. Their judgement is an asset. Their ability to resolve unexpected problems is an asset.
But an organisation should not have to depend indefinitely on individual heroics to maintain routine performance.
If your most experienced operations employee were unavailable tomorrow, which process would become difficult to run, and what would that tell you about the system behind it?
That is a question worth answering before the next automation project begins.
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Further reading:
- Your warehouse is automated. So why are you still flying blind?
- The operational mistakes that keep complex businesses running below their potential
- Why operational visibility must come before automation
- The difference between visibility, control and intelligence in complex operations
Joshua Otomo is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Tennext Core Ltd (TENNXT), an enterprise systems integrator focused on intelligent software, industrial automation and operational analytics. He writes about how large organisations get technology projects right and, more often, why they don't.
