Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
A workaround outlives its problem because everyone pays a little to keep it
An Entrepreneur column traces how a temporary tracker became the condition that completes a handoff, and why the case for keeping it holds even after every team can see the duplicate work. It never says who owns the downside of switching it off.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- A launch team facing unreliable information across several functions was given a manual tracker and a weekly reconciliation by leadership so that critical gaps would not get missed.
- Months later the underlying process was stronger and the information more reliable, and both the tracker and the weekly reconciliation stayed in place.
- People across several functions kept updating the formal system and then checking the workaround, and everyone involved could see the duplication.
- The column's explanation is that the cost of keeping the workaround was spread across many people while the risk of removing it was not.
- Such workarounds enter under pressure, when something important is not working reliably and a proper fix is too far off to wait for.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint No single team loses enough time for the duplication to feel intolerable, so the organization never gets the trigger that normally starts a removal project.
- decision The choice on the table is who absorbs a one-off downside. That makes a housekeeping item into a risk allocation call, and it needs a named owner and a restart rule.
- exposure Switching the workaround off surrenders a protection built against a failure that actually happened, and the organization is left holding a visible loss if the old condition returns.
- capability Reading the workaround as a handoff condition gives leaders somewhere specific to look, since the lost time sits at a boundary that reviews organised by function do not cover.
Keeping a workaround is one kind of bet, and removing one is another. The column's list of continuing costs is mundane: several teams lose time, information gets entered twice, meetings include one more reconciliation, decisions wait for an extra check, and none of those costs necessarily produces a single moment large enough to force action [9]. Removal is one event. The organization gives up something that once protected it from a real failure, and what it takes on instead is a concentrated, visible downside [10].
The standard response to duplicate work is to make it visible, and the column argues that visibility is not the binding constraint. "I've seen workarounds survive long after people openly acknowledge that they create duplicate effort," the contributor wrote [6]. "Awareness alone still may not create a reason strong enough to remove it" [7].
This is a contributor opinion piece rather than research: one launch team, no company named, and the column gives no figure for the drag [11][12]. It also locates the concentrated downside at the level of the organization [10]. The step from there to a claim that blame lands on whoever pulls the plug is a plausible reading of how these decisions get remembered, but the column does not make it, and nothing in the text puts the risk on a named individual [12]. On the asymmetry itself the evidence is clear.
Switch the tracker off, watch for a month, turn it back on if anything breaks. That is close to the right answer, and the column explains why it rarely gets done that way. The extra step has become part of the handoff, so one team can finish its work and the next team still cannot act [8]. Removing it therefore changes when other people are allowed to move. The reversal test needs a date, an owner for the restart, and an agreed signal that the old failure has reappeared. Absent those, the trial has no defined end, and the first uncomfortable week ends it.
The decision available this quarter is narrow: stop one reconciliation and hand several teams back part of a week [9]. The decision it sets up is who answers if the gap the tracker was built to cover reopens [10].
What to watch
- A measured figure for duplicate effort at handoffs would turn this argument into a budget line. The column gives no figure.
- Cases where a removal was reversed, and who absorbed the reversal, would show whether the concentrated downside sits with the organization or with one manager.
- A function-scoped review that actually located a between-team delay would weaken the claim that per-function oversight cannot see it.