The Symptom
A recognisable pattern appears in growing organisations: alongside the official system of record, a second, unofficial version of the same information starts to accumulate — a shared spreadsheet, a side document, a set of notes that duplicate what the main system is supposed to hold. It usually starts small and is rarely sanctioned by anyone. It simply appears, is maintained by whoever needs it, and quietly becomes load-bearing.
Consider an organisation where staff maintain such a spreadsheet, duplicating data already held in the main system. It is not hidden. Everyone who needs it knows it exists and uses it routinely.
What Leaders Usually Conclude
The common read is that this reflects resistance to the official system — reluctance to change, inadequate training, or a preference for old habits. The response this produces is often a renewed push to enforce use of the official tool: more training, clearer instructions, a reminder that the workaround is not sanctioned.
Why It Happens
Looked at more closely, the workaround usually turns out to be a rational response to an unmet requirement, not a rejection of the system itself. In the case above, the main system cannot produce a combined view of two fields that staff need to see together — and the request to build that view has been sitting in a development queue for an extended period. The spreadsheet is not an act of resistance. It is what people do when a system does not yet do something they need it to do and no other route to that need exists.
This connects to a broader pattern in how organisational complexity accumulates. As Jay Galbraith’s work on organisation design set out, the amount of information an organisation needs to process rises with the uncertainty and interdependence of its tasks, and the organisation’s structures need to evolve to absorb that rising load. When the formal structure — in this case, the system of record — does not evolve fast enough, an informal structure grows up around the gap it leaves. That informal structure is not random; it forms precisely where the formal one falls short, which is why workarounds so often cluster around the same handful of genuine unmet needs rather than appearing at random.
The complexity this creates is compounding rather than one-off. Once two versions of the same data exist, the organisation also now needs a policy — implicit or explicit — for which one governs when they disagree. Usually no such policy exists, because nobody set out to create two versions of the truth; it accumulated as a side effect of an unmet need.
What It Looks Like in Practice
A parallel record — spreadsheet, shared document, personal tracker — that duplicates part of what an official system is meant to hold.
The parallel record is maintained by the people closest to the actual need, not imposed from above.
Attempts to eliminate the workaround by enforcing the official system tend to fail if the underlying gap the workaround fills is not itself addressed.
Nobody has ever explicitly decided which version — official or unofficial — takes precedence when the two disagree.
Consequences That Extend Beyond the Workaround Itself
The most immediate risk of an unresolved dual-record situation is data disagreement with no rule for resolving it — but this is rarely the only cost. New staff, trained on the official system, are often unaware the parallel version exists until they encounter a discrepancy directly, at which point they have no basis for knowing which one to trust. Reports and decisions drawing on the official system may silently omit whatever the workaround was created to capture, without anyone downstream realising the picture is incomplete. And because the workaround typically exists outside any formal backup, access control, or audit process, it also represents a quiet, usually unrecognised increase in operational risk relative to the system it is compensating for.
A further complication, easy to overlook, is that the workaround’s existence can mask the true scale of the underlying gap. Because staff have found a way to cope, the unmet requirement stops generating visible pressure — support tickets stop being filed, complaints stop being raised — even though the underlying need is exactly as real as it was before the workaround existed. This is one of the more counterintuitive effects of a good, functional workaround: by solving the immediate problem, it can remove the very signal that would otherwise prompt the formal system to be improved.
This pattern also tends to be self-perpetuating in a way worth naming directly. The longer a workaround runs successfully, the more its users come to trust it over the official system for the specific purpose it serves — which means even after the underlying gap is eventually closed in the formal system, the workaround may persist out of habit and accumulated trust, long after its original justification has expired. What began as a rational response to a genuine gap can outlive the gap itself, joining the broader category of temporary arrangements that quietly become permanent without anyone deciding they should.
For how this pattern presents in other kinds of organisation, see other sectors.
Questions worth considering
- What unofficial records, spreadsheets, or side-systems exist in the organisation, and what genuine need are they meeting that the formal system does not?
- If the workaround disappeared tomorrow, what would people be unable to do?
- Is there a clear, shared understanding of which version of the data is authoritative when the two disagree?
- Has the existence of a working workaround quietly reduced the pressure to fix the underlying gap it compensates for?
- If the original gap were closed tomorrow, would the workaround actually stop being used, or has it become a habit independent of the need that created it?
- What does a persistent workaround reveal about the gap between a system and the work?
This perspective is part of Operations.
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