“That’s not technically the process, but here’s how we actually do it.”

Anyone who has worked inside an organization recognizes the sentence. The written process says: complete the form, obtain approval, enter the request, wait for confirmation. The experienced employee says something else. “Just message Dana. She’ll handle it.” “We stopped using that form months ago.” “That approval is required, but nobody waits for it.” “The spreadsheet is more current than the system.”

The organization now has two processes: the one it documents and the one it trusts. That is a governance problem.

Every Workaround Begins by Solving Something

Do not demonize workarounds. They often arise because the formal process is too slow, the tool does not match the actual work, authority sits at the wrong level, required information is unnecessary, conditions changed, capacity is insufficient, or the official system is simply broken. A workaround may be intelligent local adaptation.

The first task is diagnosis, not punishment.

Temporary Solutions Become Dangerous When Nobody Reassesses Them

A workaround may initially be justified. A system goes down for two days, so staff build a spreadsheet. Six months later, the spreadsheet is the real source of truth. A shortcut appears during a crisis. The crisis ends. The shortcut remains.

Ask what was supposed to make this temporary. If nobody knows, the temporary path may already be permanent. Every temporary workaround needs either an expiration, a review point, or an intentional promotion into the formal process.

The Shadow System Eventually Becomes More Trusted Than the Formal One

When formal process loses credibility, people learn which rules matter, which approvals are ceremonial, who can actually get things done, where the real information lives, and who to call when the system fails. New employees receive two versions of training: the official one — “this is the process” — and the real one — “here is how we actually get it done.”

That gap creates dependency, confusion, unequal access, onboarding problems, and governance weakness. The larger the gap between documented process and lived process, the more institutional knowledge becomes political knowledge. People succeed based on who they know and what unwritten rules they have learned.

Workarounds Create Hidden Authority

The formal structure may say one role owns a decision. The workaround may hand practical authority to someone else — an administrative assistant who becomes the real approval gate, a senior volunteer who informally decides what gets prioritized, a technician who controls critical institutional knowledge, a founder who bypasses department heads, a longtime employee who becomes the unofficial exception authority.

That person may be highly competent. The problem is not competence. The problem is authority without explicit assignment or accountability.

Repeated Workarounds Create Key-Person Dependency

If the workaround depends on someone who remembers, knows, fixes, interprets, approves, or rescues, the organization may be mistaking that person’s competence for system reliability. Ask what stops working if this person disappears for two weeks. If the answer is “everything around this process,” the organization has not solved the problem. It has assigned the problem to a person.

A workaround held together by one capable individual is still a structural dependency.

The Workaround May Be Better Than the Rule

Do not assume the formal process deserves preservation. Sometimes the workaround is evidence that the organization has already discovered a better design — a shorter approval path, a simpler intake, a better scheduling method, a clearer communication route, a more useful documentation format.

If the answers are yes, redesign the formal process around it. Good governance does not preserve obsolete process out of loyalty to documentation. It makes the documentation tell the truth.

Some Workarounds Should Be Eliminated

A workaround should not survive merely because it is convenient. Eliminate or constrain it when it bypasses necessary controls, creates material risk, hides decisions, enables favoritism, compromises privacy, removes accountability, depends on undocumented personal discretion, or produces inconsistent outcomes. The decision should rest on purpose and risk — never on nostalgia for the formal process.

Use the Three-Way Workaround Decision

For each repeated workaround, choose one of three actions.

Stop Maintaining Two Versions of Reality

A governance system loses credibility when procedures describe behavior nobody follows, org charts show authority nobody uses, policies specify controls everyone bypasses, and documentation says one thing while training teaches another. At some point leadership must choose: change behavior to match the system, or change the system to match legitimate behavior.

AI Makes Shadow Systems More Important to Resolve

Before automation, a shadow process may remain local. After automation, the organization may accidentally encode it, accelerate it, duplicate it, or scale it. Automation projects should therefore include shadow-process discovery: ask staff what they actually do, what they skip, who they really ask, which tool is actually current, and what happens when the documented route fails. Do not automate the process map until you have compared it with the lived workflow.

Run a Shadow-System Audit

Identify one process where people routinely say, “Here is how we actually do it.” Then document:

Governance Should Make Reality Legible

Good governance allows a reasonable person to understand how work actually happens, who owns it, who decides, where exceptions occur, and how those exceptions are handled. It should not require insider knowledge.

A Strategic Reframe

At the personal level, an exception becomes a private operating rule. At the leadership level, it becomes modeled behavior. At the AI level, it becomes scalable logic. At the governance level, it becomes an institutionalized shadow process.

Return to the sentence this piece opened with: “That’s not technically the process, but here’s how we actually do it.” That sentence should make leadership curious, not defensive. It may indicate bad behavior, obsolete process, unclear authority, weak tooling, or intelligent adaptation. But it should never remain invisible.

The goal is not to eliminate every workaround. The goal is to stop allowing essential work to depend on a system leadership refuses to acknowledge.

If the workaround has become how the work gets done, govern it honestly: formalize it, contain it, or remove it — but stop pretending it is still an exception.