The Workaround
Why process shouldn't drive strategy
Every organisation has its workarounds. The spreadsheet that tells the truth more clearly than the dashboard. The Teams chat where the real decision gets made after the meeting has ended. The person everyone goes to because they know how the process actually works, which is not quite the same as knowing how it is supposed to work. The form that has to be completed, then explained, then quietly worked around. The official route through the system, and the unofficial way everyone learns by watching someone else.
We tend to treat these things as small acts of practical intelligence. Sometimes they are. Workarounds can be useful, generous, even necessary. They are how people keep moving when the formal system is too slow, too rigid or too distant from the work it claims to organise.
But they are also diagnostic. A workaround tells us something. It marks the place where a system cannot quite carry the load. It shows us where judgement has been squeezed out, where trust has been replaced by assurance, where lived complexity has been flattened into a process map. It is the moment when the human being has to return to the system because the system, left to itself, does not know how to behave.
However, few failed systems begin with bad intentions. They start with ambitions that sound reasonable enough. Make this process clearer. Make that programme easier to manage. Build a more consistent route from idea to impact. Help busy people make better decisions. Create a framework. Develop a tool. Introduce a dashboard. Standardise the workflow. Reduce duplication. Improve accountability.
These are not foolish aims. In fact, they are often the aims of thoughtful people trying to make messy institutions work a little better. Universities, funders, public bodies and consultancies are full of people who can see that something is not working and want to fix it. They know the current system is too slow, too fragmented, too dependent on memory and goodwill. So they build something.
But then, somehow, the thing they build starts to make the problem worse. A form is introduced to reduce ambiguity, but creates a new layer of interpretation. A dashboard is created to make performance visible, but quietly shifts attention towards what can be counted. A governance process is designed to provide assurance, but slows decision-making until the opportunity has gone cold. A new digital system promises a single source of truth, but produces shadow spreadsheets, private documents and Teams chats full of quiet despair. A co-design process is launched to make work more participatory, but the parameters have already been fixed elsewhere.
Nobody intended to create a system that people would resent. Nobody wrote “increase friction” in the project plan. Nobody said the purpose of this process was to convert professional judgement into administrative compliance. Yet that is often what happens.
The strange thing about many institutional systems is that they are built by humans trying very hard to be rational. They are constructed around a view of work that looks plausible from above. From that height, the world appears orderly enough. Inputs go in. Outputs come out. Roles can be defined. Risks can be logged. Progress can be tracked. Impact can be captured. Stakeholders can be mapped. A plan can be produced, preferably with milestones, owners, dependencies and a colour-coded RAG rating.
Indeed, such maps have their uses. Anyone who has spent time around strategy knows that. They simplify, highlight and help people orient themselves. They allow us to talk about complex terrain without being lost in every ditch, hedge and locked gate. The trouble comes when we forget that the map is not the territory. The model is not the work. Reality has a habit of refusing to stay within the boundaries we draw around it.
In fact, meaningful work rarely behaves like a process map for very long. Innovation work especially does not behave like this. Neither does knowledge exchange, research commercialisation, institutional change, partnership-building, service design, policy engagement or any of the other forms of work that involve people, uncertainty and politics. These activities are not linear routes from problem to solution. They are closer to a series of adjustments made under changing conditions. You notice something. You test it. You discover that the stated problem is not quite the real problem. You follow a conversation sideways. You learn that one stakeholder is nervous, another is powerful, a third is quietly doing all the work, and the published strategy has almost nothing to do with the live constraints inside the organisation.
Then the system asks you to update the action tracker, and this is where the gap opens up. There is the work as it is lived: relational, interpretive, provisional, dependent on timing, trust and judgement. And there is the work as the institution needs to see it: bounded, reportable, comparable, auditable, defensible. Problems begin when the second version is mistaken for the first. When the representation of the work starts to stand in for the work itself. When process begins to define what can be imagined, what can be attempted, what can be defended, and ultimately what can be done. That is when process starts to drive strategy. And that is a very dangerous place to be.
I have seen this pattern from several angles now: inside funding systems, inside universities, around consultancy projects, in workshops, on steering groups, in the strange half-lit spaces where strategy becomes delivery and everyone starts to realise the map was drawn before anyone walked the ground.
It is not that people do not care about the work. Often they care a great deal. The problem is that care itself has no easy column in the spreadsheet. So, the system reaches for substitutes. Activity becomes evidence of progress. Attendance becomes evidence of engagement. A completed template becomes evidence of thought. A governance meeting becomes evidence of oversight. A strategy document becomes evidence of alignment. A case study becomes evidence of impact. A training session becomes evidence of capability-building. A consultation becomes evidence of consent.
Sometimes these things are meaningful. Often, they are not exactly meaningless, which is what makes the problem harder to name. They are adjacent to the work. They gesture towards the work. They leave traces of the work. But they are not the work itself. A good conversation can change the direction of a project. A badly designed form can flatten it. A difficult question asked at the right moment can save months of effort. A poorly chosen metric can train everyone to perform the wrong behaviour. One trusted translator inside a system can do more to unlock impact than a new process document circulated to two hundred people.
Most institutional systems struggle to recognise this because they are designed to see what travels well. Numbers travel well. Templates travel well. Slide decks travel well. Dashboards travel well. Minutes travel well. RAG ratings travel well. But the small acts of interpretation that make complex work possible do not travel well. They are local, situated, often tacit. They live in the room, in the timing of an intervention, in the choice not to push too hard too early, in knowing when a stakeholder is saying “yes” but meaning “not yet”, in understanding that the official route through a process is not always the route through which anything actually happens.
This is where managerialism does its quietest damage. There is a difference between management and managerialism. Management is necessary. Good management creates clarity, makes decisions possible, protects people from chaos and helps organisations use their resources well. Anyone who has worked inside a badly managed organisation knows that an absence of structure is not freedom. It is usually exhaustion with worse filing. Managerialism is something else. It is the belief that work becomes more legitimate as it becomes more visible, more measurable, more standardised and more controlled. It treats professional judgement as a problem to be constrained, local knowledge as a source of inconsistency, and discretion as a risk to be managed. It is seductive because it sounds responsible. It offers order, comparability, assurance and control. It promises to make messy work legible to people who sit far away from it. But complex work does not become more intelligent simply because it becomes more supervised.
At some point, a system has to decide what it trusts. Many managerial systems are built on a quiet suspicion of professional judgement. They assume that consistency is safer than discretion, that compliance is more reliable than expertise, and that if enough process is added uncertainty can be reduced to manageable proportions. Yet expertise matters precisely because reality does not arrive in manageable proportions. People closest to the work often see things that cannot yet be captured in a metric or formal report. Experienced practitioners recognise patterns, notice shifts in relationships and sense when assumptions are beginning to fail. They know when to push and when to wait. They know which meeting matters, which objection is real, which apparent agreement is only politeness, and which minor irritation will become a serious problem if nobody attends to it.
A system that cannot trust these forms of judgement eventually forces people to choose between serving the work and serving the process. Most people try to do both and that is where the workaround begins.
This is not an argument for heroic individualism. A world run only through relationships and tacit knowledge is not humane either. It privileges insiders, rewards those who know the unwritten rules, and leaves everyone else struggling in the dark. It also makes organisations too dependent on particular people, often the same people who are asked to absorb friction every time the formal system fails.
Structure, accountability and assurance all matter. In public and quasi-public systems especially, they matter a great deal. The question is where trust sits in the design.
A good system does not pretend uncertainty can be eliminated by planning language. It creates enough structure to hold the work, but not so much that the work has to deform itself to fit the structure. It recognises that judgement is not a failure of process. It treats adaptation as a sign of intelligence rather than drift. It allows evidence to include what practitioners are learning, not only what can be counted at quarterly intervals. It also makes room for the unofficial knowledge that experienced people use every day, while making that knowledge more visible and shareable so it does not remain trapped solely in the heads of individuals.
This matters because many organisations are currently trying to innovate with systems that were designed to prevent embarrassment. That may sound harsh, but I think it is often true. Much institutional design is less about enabling good work than producing defensible accounts of work. It is designed so that, if challenged, the organisation can say: we had a process; we consulted stakeholders; we reviewed the risks; we monitored delivery; we captured outputs; we complied with the framework.
None of these things is inherently wrong. The problem comes when accountability starts to consume the thing it is meant to protect. You can see this in innovation programmes that become more concerned with running a fair competition than developing good ideas. Or in research impact systems that reward the production of narratives after the event rather than the patient building of relationships before anything visible happens. You can see it in university processes that ask academics to become more entrepreneurial, while surrounding them with approval routes that would test the patience of a saint with a Gantt chart. Or in digital transformation projects that make work more legible to senior leaders and more irritating for everyone else.
Over time, people learn how to survive inside these systems. They translate their work into the language the institution understands. They learn which boxes need enough text to pass. They create private documents that reflect the real work and public documents that satisfy the official process. They attend meetings where everyone performs alignment, then have the useful conversation afterwards with three people in a corridor or on a call. They become fluent in institutional theatre.
This is costly. Not only because it wastes time, though it does, but also because it trains people to split their attention between doing the work and representing the work. The better they become at representation, the more the institution believes the system is functioning. The more the system appears to function, the harder it becomes to challenge.
A beautifully maintained dashboard can be a sign that everything is on track. It can also be a polished brass dial on a machine that is overheating in the basement.
The people closest to the work usually know the difference. The difficulty is that they may not have the authority, language or permission to say so. When they do say so, they can sound negative. They can be accused of resisting change, lacking ambition, failing to understand the bigger picture. Sometimes they may even be told they are not being sufficiently innovative, which is a neat trick when the system itself is the thing preventing adaptation.
This is one reason translators matter. Not translators in the narrow sense of people who turn research findings into plain English, useful though that can be. I mean the people who can move between worlds: between senior strategy and operational reality, between academic knowledge and institutional need, between policy ambition and delivery conditions, between what a system says it wants and what its incentives actually reward. Translators notice when the design is asking people to behave in ways in which people do not. They recognise when a process assumes a level of certainty the work cannot provide. They are aware when the official problem is a polite fiction. They detect when the metric has become the mission’s ventriloquist. Good translators do not simply smooth things over. Sometimes they make the friction visible. They help institutions understand where the system is rubbing against the grain of the work.
That phrase matters to me: working with the grain. A craftsperson does not impose a design on material as though the material has no properties of its own. They learn how it moves, where it resists, where it may split, what kind of pressure it can take. This is not romantic nostalgia for hand tools and sawdust. It is a practical lesson in attention. Materials have behaviour. So do institutions. So do people.
Managerialism treats people as if they are infinitely shapeable around process. Humane system design starts from the opposite assumption: that any process worth having must be designed around how people actually think, decide, avoid, trust, learn, improvise and tire.
This does not make design softer. It makes it more serious. A humane system has to ask harder questions than a purely managerial one. What behaviour are we really encouraging? What knowledge are we making visible, and what are we erasing? Who has to absorb the friction created by this process? Where will people create workarounds? What would make the right action easier than the performative one? What needs to be held centrally, and what needs to be left local? Where does consistency help, and where does it become a polite word for control?
These are not questions that can be answered by better templates alone. They require people to spend time with the work before designing the system around it. They require institutions to value interpretation, not just compliance. They require senior leaders to resist the comfort of false clarity. They require funders, universities and delivery organisations to accept that the most useful account of progress may sometimes be: we have learned that the original model was wrong, and we are changing course.
That should be a strength, but too often it is treated as a problem to be managed.
The irony is that systems built to reduce risk can create a deeper kind of risk: the risk that nobody is able to respond intelligently to reality. The plan remains intact. The reporting looks tidy. The meetings happen. The milestones are updated. Meanwhile, the actual conditions have shifted, the useful relationships have weakened, the original assumptions have expired, and the people doing the work have learned to keep their real judgement off the record.
This is how systems become inhuman without anyone choosing inhumanity. They become inhuman through distance. Through abstraction. Through the repeated conversion of living work into administrative artefacts. Through the slow replacement of judgement with procedure, trust with assurance, learning with reporting, and participation with evidence that participation occurred.
There is another way to build. It begins by taking the lived texture of work seriously. Not as anecdote to be tidied away, but as data. It asks what people are actually doing, not only what the process says they should be doing. It treats workarounds as diagnostic clues. It designs for feedback, adjustment and repair. It assumes that complex work needs rhythm rather than rigid sequencing. It builds in moments where people can stop, look at what is happening, and change the design before the design becomes a cage.
This, therefore, is not a call for less discipline. It is a call for better discipline. To stay with the problem before rushing to the solution. To notice when a system is producing compliance instead of learning. To design around human behaviour rather than institutional fantasy. To admit that a process can be perfectly implemented and still be wrong.
If innovation is going to mean anything more than new language wrapped around old habits, this is where we need to begin. Not with another framework that promises certainty, another dashboard that turns complexity into coloured boxes, or another workshop that invites people to co-create inside decisions already made. We need systems that help people notice, judge, adapt and act together.
That may sound simple. In reality, it is anything but. It asks institutions to give up some of the comforts of administrative neatness in exchange for something more demanding: the possibility of doing the right work, in the right way, with enough honesty to see when the system itself has become part of the problem.
Maps matter. Strategy matters. Process matters. But none of them are the territory itself. The territory is where people work, improvise, learn, hesitate, negotiate and adapt. It is where relationships are built and opportunities are missed. It is where expertise lives. It is usually far messier than the map allows.
Good systems help us navigate that territory, but they do not mistake the map for the landscape or insist that reality conform to the legend in the corner. And that requires something unfashionable in many organisations: trust.
Trust that expertise matters, that judgement is not a defect to be designed out, that people closest to the work may understand things that cannot yet be measured, that learning and adaptation are signs of intelligence rather than failures of planning.
When process begins to drive strategy, organisations start serving the map instead of the territory. Workarounds are what people invent when they know, often instinctively, that the territory still matters.
