The Work Around the Work

For a long time, organizational problems came down to two things: people and process.

If the process was working, the problem must be the people. If the people were capable, then the process must be broken. If something was not getting done, somebody was not doing their job.

That explanation works right up until it does not.

What happens when the people are capable and the process is technically sound, and the work still doesn’t work?

That’s when you must start looking at everything around the people and the process.

I learned that lesson slowly. In 2014 and 2015, I became so obsessed with figuring out whether problems were caused by people or process that I earned my Six Sigma Yellow Belt, Green Belt, and Black Belt. I wanted to understand how to find the problem, prove the problem, and fix the problem. I learned how to dig deeper than the initial answer, how to talk to the people actually doing the work, how to follow a process through its handoffs, and how to find the workarounds hiding underneath the documented version of how something was supposed to happen.

I also learned something I didn’t particularly enjoy learning: a good analysis doesn’t give you authority. It gives you information.

You can spend weeks talking to the people doing the work, tracing what happens instead of what the process says should happen, following failures upstream and downstream, and figuring out where the workarounds began. You can find the pattern, explain why it’s happening, name the risks, and recommend that, based on everything you can see, makes sense.

And then someone else gets to decide what happens next.

Sometimes they know something you don’t. Sometimes you don’t have full visibility. Sometimes there are constraints you can’t see from where you are sitting. And sometimes they decide you think is completely wrong.

That was difficult for me because I’ve always been a pattern person. I see connections. I see where one problem is creating another problem three steps downstream. I see the workaround nobody documented and the behavior everyone has quietly accepted because it’s easier to keep doing it than to fix whatever created it in the first place.

But pattern recognition isn’t omniscience.

I didn’t always have the full picture, and recognizing that gave me a lot more respect for the leaders I supported. They were making decisions with information and constraints I didn’t always have access to. It didn’t mean I agreed with every decision. It meant I understood that being right about a process didn’t automatically make my recommendation the decision.

That realization led me somewhere else. I started noticing that “people or process” was often a convenient way of talking about problems that were much larger than either one.

A process can be perfectly reasonable on paper and impossible to execute with the resources available. A capable team can fail because a decision was made upstream without anyone considering what would happen downstream. A company can announce a major change and genuinely believe it has communicated appropriately while the people responsible for carrying it out are trying to figure out what just happened.

Sometimes nobody is lying. Sometimes nobody has the whole picture.

The people making the decisions may have information the people doing the work don’t have, while the people doing the work are seeing things the people making the decisions can’t. There is a gap between those two perspectives, and that gap is where a lot of organizational dysfunction lives.

I started noticing another piece of it in something that seems almost harmless on the surface: volunteering.

Early in my career, I was the person who raised her hand. If there was something I didn’t understand, I wanted to see how it worked. If another department was testing something, I wanted to be in the room. If somebody needed a beta tester, I was in. I wasn’t doing it because I had extra time. I did it because I was curious, and curiosity was one of the ways I figured out where I fit.

Every new assignment gave me another piece of the organization to understand. I learned how the work moved, where it got stuck, who depended on whom, and why the people doing one job often had no idea what the people doing the job next to them were dealing with. I was building breadth without really thinking about it.

At the time, I just thought I was learning.

But over the years, I watched volunteering change.

As organizations became leaner and people became increasingly constrained, volunteering stopped being entirely about curiosity or professional development. It became a capacity mechanism. The person who had proven that they could run an analysis was asked to run another one. The person who could build the deck was asked to build the next deck. The request was usually reasonable in isolation. The problem was what happened cumulatively.

You didn’t want to be the person who wasn’t a team player when everyone else was overloaded. You didn’t want to hear that your reluctance to help showed a lack of leadership. So, you did it.

Then you did it again.

Eventually, the thing you had volunteered to do became part of how the organization understood your role.

That’s where something changed.

Competence became a tax.

The better you were at absorbing work, the more work you became capable of absorbing. And people notice that. They learn what gets rewarded, what gets questioned, and what gets quietly added to their plate because somebody knows they’ll figure it out.

This is one of the reasons I don’t think you can understand workplace behavior by looking only at what people are told to do. People pay attention to what happens. If the person who stays late is considered committed, people learn that staying late is part of commitment. If the person who identifies a problem becomes known as difficult, people become more selective about which problems they bring forward.

You can write all the values you want on the wall, but people learn the culture by watching what happens to people.

And then they adapt.

That’s what humans do. Give a team fewer people and they’ll redistribute the work. Change the process and someone will find a workaround. We are remarkably adaptable, and that adaptability is both one of the great strengths of an organization and one of its greatest risks.

A resilient employee can make a broken system look functional. A capable team can absorb an enormous amount of organizational dysfunction without the organization ever having to fully experience the consequences of that dysfunction. The customer still gets the deliverable. The deadline still gets met. From the outside, everything appears to be working.

Inside the system, people are holding the whole thing together with workarounds, extra hours, undocumented knowledge, and an increasingly sophisticated understanding of what they can change without asking permission.

The people become the shock absorbers.

Once an organization learns that its people will absorb the shock, it becomes very easy to keep generating it.

That’s when I started asking a question that seemed obvious to me and wasn’t always obvious to everyone else:

What are we taking away?

If we’re adding a new governance process, what are we removing? If we’re adding another reporting requirement, what responsibility is coming off the person’s plate? If we’re asking people to reconcile three different systems, what part of their existing work are we expecting them to stop doing?

The hours must come from somewhere.

If someone already has primary, secondary, and tertiary responsibilities and you add three more responsibilities, you haven’t created capacity simply by calling the new work governance, accountability, or transformation. You’ve taken capacity from somewhere else.

People will figure out where to take it. They’ll work later, skip something, create a shortcut, or find a workaround that makes the new requirement possible without actually changing the underlying work.

Then the organization looks at the numbers and wonders why quality has started to decline.

This is how you end up tracking the tracker. You create a system to measure the work, then you need to reconcile the measurement, and eventually people are spending so much time proving that the work is happening that they have less time to actually do it.

Measurement matters. Accountability matters. Governance matters. But they have a cost, and when we keep adding things without taking anything away, the cost doesn’t disappear.

It gets absorbed by the person doing the work.

That’s the work around the work.

I’ve seen the same thing happen with staffing. You start with a certain amount of work and a certain number of people. Then people leave, but the work doesn’t necessarily leave with them. The deadlines remain. The clients remain. The institutional knowledge disappears, but the expectation that the work will continue doesn’t.

So, the remaining people absorb it.

Then leadership wants more visibility, so more reporting gets added. More reconciliation gets added because nobody trusts the reporting. Eventually, the people doing the work aren’t just doing the work anymore. They are carrying an increasingly elaborate system designed to prove they are doing the work.

Those are two different jobs.

This is one of the places where organizations can fool themselves about capacity. They look at the number of people and the number of projects and calculate whether the math works, but the math often doesn’t include everything surrounding the project. It doesn’t include the reporting, the meetings, the workarounds, the time spent figuring out who owns something because the organizational structure changed, or the cognitive load of constantly adapting to whatever changed the week before.

That work is real, even when it isn’t represented in the staffing model.

The same thing happens after layoffs. We tend to focus on the people who leave because they’re the visible consequence of the decision, but there is another group sitting inside the organization: the people who stay.

They have to figure out what happens to the work, who owns the projects, who takes the relationships, who knows how the process actually works, and who absorbs the responsibilities that used to belong to the people who are no longer there.

The people who leave absorb one kind of shock. The people who stay absorb another.

And then they adapt.

Eventually, adaptability becomes the job. Not something you use to perform your job, but the job itself: adapting to whatever the organization just did.

That can work for a surprisingly long time, until it doesn’t. Quality starts to suffer. People become more cautious about speaking up. They stop believing that communicating a problem will actually change anything. They start protecting their time and their options. They do what they’re asked to do, but they’re less willing to absorb everything that isn’t explicitly theirs.

And eventually, some of them leave.

Then the organization replaces them, and the cycle starts again.

This is why I think we have to be careful about the way we talk about organizational dysfunction. The data can be there. The analysis can be there. The risks can be communicated, and the recommendations can be made, and still nothing changes.

That doesn’t necessarily mean leadership is stupid. It doesn’t necessarily mean leadership doesn’t care. It doesn’t necessarily mean the analysis was wrong.

Organizations make decisions inside constraints that aren’t always visible to the people doing the analysis. There are budgets and timing and competing priorities. There are decisions that have already been made before the people responsible for executing them are told. There are leaders balancing things the person sitting across from them cannot see.

That’s part of the complexity.

But there is another side to it.

If you repeatedly ignore the signals coming from the people closest to the work, eventually those people stop sending signals. Not because the problem disappeared, but because they learned that raising it doesn’t accomplish anything.

And that is a dangerous point for an organization to reach, because the absence of information can look a lot like the absence of a problem.

It isn’t.

At some point, we have to stop asking whether the problem is the people or the process.

If the people keep changing, the process keeps changing, the reporting keeps increasing, and the same problems keep finding their way back into the room, then maybe we’re looking at the wrong level of the system.

The problem isn’t necessarily the person doing the work. It isn’t necessarily the process they’re following. It may be the environment those two things are operating inside: the decisions being made upstream, the constraints being created somewhere else, the information that isn’t reaching the people who need it, and all the additional work being layered on top of the work we’re actually trying to accomplish.

For years, I thought my job was to find the broken piece and fix it. What I eventually realized was that sometimes there isn’t one broken piece. There is a system that has accumulated so many compromises, workarounds, and competing demands that everyone inside it is compensating just to keep it moving.

And when enough people are compensating for a system, the compensation starts to look like the system itself.

That’s when it becomes difficult to see what’s actually broken.

Because the work is still getting done.

The deadlines are still being met. The reports are still being produced. The problems are still being solved.

Until you finally ask the question nobody has been asking:

What if the people aren’t failing the system? What if the system has been relying on the people to keep it from failing?