When Did “Temporary” Become the Process?
How good-judgment workarounds quietly become normalized risk
There is a sentence I hear in operations that always makes me curious:
“We’re only doing it this way for now.”
Fair enough.
Sometimes the system is down.
A customer needs an immediate answer.
A shipment has to move.
Someone creates a spreadsheet, starts a side conversation or manually corrects the information.
Problem solved.
Everybody exhales.
The trouble is, nobody always remembers to go back and remove the temporary solution.
Three months later, the spreadsheet is still there.
Six months later, it has three tabs and a color-coded legend.
By next year, someone is training the new employee on how to maintain it.
Congratulations.
The workaround has been promoted.
Workarounds Usually Begin With Good Judgment
Most workarounds are not created by careless employees.
They are created by capable people trying to protect the customer, meet a commitment or keep the operation moving.
That matters.
The employee is not necessarily avoiding the process.
The employee may be compensating for what the process cannot handle.
- A missing handoff.
- Information stored in different systems.
- An exception the workflow was never designed to recognize.
- A decision that requires context only one experienced person knows.
The workaround may be intelligent.
Depending on it indefinitely is where the risk begins.
The Pattern Changes Quietly
A temporary fix rarely becomes standard practice all at once.
It moves through a pattern:
- Issue
- Workaround
- Routine
- Complacency
- Standard Practice
- Normalized Risk
At first, someone says: “I’ll handle it.”
Later, the team says: “That’s how we handle it.”
Eventually, the organization says: “That’s how the process works.”
But it is not the process.
It is the extra effort surrounding the process.
When that effort becomes normal, leaders may stop seeing it.
The report shows that the work was completed.
It does not show the reminders, manual corrections, side conversations or individual judgment required to complete it.
The dashboard sees the result.
The employee remembers the chase.
The Signal to Watch
Pay attention when employees use phrases like:
- “You have to know who to call.”
- “The system doesn’t show the full story.”
- “I keep my own version.”
- “We always double-check that manually.”
- “Don’t worry—I know how to get it through.”
Those statements are not complaints to dismiss.
They are operational signals.
They may be telling you that the documented process and the real process are no longer the same.
That difference is important for the customer.
It is important for succession planning.
And it becomes extremely important when the organization wants to automate the work or introduce AI.
You cannot redesign—or automate—work you have not accurately described.
This Week’s PRISM Lens
This week, look at two parts of PRISM:
Where is the same workaround appearing repeatedly?
Where does success depend on one person remembering what to do?
You do not need another task force to begin.
Start with one conversation.
Ask the people closest to the work what they routinely do that the official process does not capture.
Then listen without immediately defending the process.
The answer may reveal that an employee is not working around the organization.
They may be quietly holding it together.
One Question for Your Leadership Team
What temporary solution has become so familiar that nobody thinks to call it temporary anymore?
On October 1, The Signal Library will take a closer look at what fourth-quarter pressure reveals about hidden workarounds, operational instability and the effort sitting underneath clean performance metrics.
The October Signal: Q4 Looks Fine. The Workaround Says Otherwise.
The signal was already there.
What has your organization learned to work around instead of actually fixing?
The dashboard gives you the metric.
I’ll help you find the signal.
Once a month, I break down one operational signal leaders may be seeing—but not yet recognizing.
Expect practical observations about hidden risk, normalized workarounds, organizational intelligence and what is really happening underneath the dashboard.
Is a Workaround Becoming Your Process?
The free PRISM Signal Scan helps you identify where work is becoming harder than it should be—and which early signals deserve a closer look.