What keeps a system working can also hide what's wrong with it.

A system can look perfectly functional while people quietly compensate for what it cannot do on its own. The problem often becomes visible only when that compensation becomes impossible.

Some things in organizations work for reasons that have very little to do with how they were designed.

A process can look perfectly functional because the same person quietly fixes the same problem every week. A responsibility can appear clear because someone always steps in when nobody else does. Two teams can seem well coordinated because one person has become very good at connecting what happens between them.

The work gets done, so the system appears to work. What is harder to see is how much of that functioning may depend on people compensating for what doesn't.

People are good at filling gaps. They remember the exception that isn't documented. They know who to ask when the process leads nowhere. They notice what has been missed and fix it before it becomes a problem for someone else.

Do that often enough and the workaround becomes part of how the organization operates. Except we rarely call it a workaround anymore.

We call it the process.

The organization works. Just not always for the reasons we think it does.

This can continue for a long time, until the person who always fills the gap leaves, the volume becomes too high for one person to keep compensating, or more people need to use a process that only works because a few know how to navigate around it.

Then something that appeared reliable suddenly starts failing. It is easy to think that this is when the problem began. Often, it is simply when the compensation became impossible.

The person who kept stepping in wasn't necessarily evidence that ownership was clear. The person fixing the process may have been the reason it appeared to work.

They were making the gaps less visible.

When the workaround stops working, we finally get to see what it was holding together.