Why Your Workaround Is Actually Genius
Uncover the hidden intelligence in your team's messy spreadsheets and unofficial processes before you automate them into oblivion.
The Brief
This article argues that workplace workarounds, such as unofficial spreadsheets and back-channel processes, encode tacit knowledge that organizations should study before automating away. It uses a real example of a support team's color-coded Google Sheet to illustrate how informal systems often solve problems that official tools miss.
- What is tacit knowledge in an organization?
- Tacit knowledge refers to things an organization knows in practice but not in documentation. The term comes from anthropologist Michael Polanyi's 1966 work The Tacit Dimension. It includes informal processes, unwritten rules, and workarounds that employees develop to solve real problems over time.
- Why do employees resist new systems that replace workarounds?
- Employees resist because their workarounds often solve problems the new system does not address. In the article's example, a support team resurrected their old spreadsheet within two weeks because it tracked a type of customer escalation that did not fit the new system's official categories.
- What does excavation before automation mean?
- Excavation before automation means observing how people actually work, not how they say they work, before building new systems. It involves finding the person who invented the workaround, understanding what problem it solves, and preserving that embedded judgment in the new design.
- How can workarounds inform better automation design?
- Workarounds reveal where official processes have gaps. By studying them, teams can identify bottlenecks, edge cases, and unmet needs that formal systems miss. The best automation amplifies the human judgment already embedded in these informal solutions rather than eliminating it.
A few years ago, I watched a company spend six months building an elegant support ticket system to replace a shared Google Sheet that their support team refused to give up. The sheet was ugly. It had seventeen tabs, color-coded rows that only made sense to three people, and a mysterious column labeled "DO NOT DELETE."
The new system launched. Within two weeks, the support team had quietly resurrected the spreadsheet alongside it.
Messy doesn't mean broken
When I asked why, a senior rep pulled up the old sheet and pointed to that mysterious column. It tracked a specific type of customer escalation that didn't fit the official categories but happened often enough to matter. The column had been invented three years earlier by someone who'd since left the company. Nobody remembered adding it. Everyone used it.
Anthropologists have a term for this: tacit knowledge.1 The things an organization knows in practice but not in documentation. Your company is full of it.
The Load-Bearing Wall
Workarounds are organizational antibodies. They emerge in response to real problems. That Slack channel where people route requests "the back way" might be compensating for a bottleneck nobody talks about. The manual step everyone insists on keeping might catch edge cases the automated system misses.
The real process is rarely the documented one
When we see inefficiency, we want to fix it. That's natural. But "fixing" a workaround without understanding its function is like removing a wall because it's in an inconvenient place. Sometimes that wall is holding up the ceiling.
Excavation Before Automation
The best automation doesn't eliminate human judgment. It amplifies it. But first, you have to understand what judgment is already embedded in the mess.
Watch before you build. Spend time observing how people actually work, not how they say they work. Find the person who invented the workaround. They remember why.
That ugly spreadsheet might be genius in disguise. Take time to learn its language before you speak over it.
References
Footnotes
-
Polanyi, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension. University of Chicago Press. ↩
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