No single workaround kills a scaling business. It’s death by a thousand of them, each one perfectly reasonable in isolation.
- Workarounds are usually a sign of competence, not laziness — good people quietly patch a broken process to keep a customer or deal moving, instead of waiting on a fix.
- The problem isn’t any individual workaround. It’s Workaround Creep: each one is locally rational but globally corrosive, hiding the real break from whoever should be fixing it.
- The fix isn’t banning workarounds — that drives them underground. It’s building a low-friction way to surface them as signals, not silent permanent patches.
Why Good Teams Build Workarounds
Nobody builds a workaround out of carelessness. They build one because the official process didn’t cover a real situation, escalating would have been slower than the customer could wait, and fixing it themselves was the competent, helpful thing to do in the moment. That instinct is exactly what you want in good people. The problem isn’t the instinct. It’s what happens when it becomes the default response to every gap instead of the exception.
Workaround Creep
Each individual workaround is locally rational: it solves today’s problem, it’s faster than escalating, and it doesn’t require anyone else’s buy-in. Stacked across a growing team over time, that same rationality becomes corrosive. Every workaround hides the underlying break from whoever should actually be fixing it, and multiplies the number of quietly different versions of “how we do this” running in parallel across the business. None of it looks like a crisis from the inside. It looks like everyone being resourceful.
No single patch looks dangerous. The accumulation is the risk, and it’s invisible from inside any one of them.
How Do You Know Workarounds Have Become the Operating Model?
The clearest sign is what onboarding a new hire actually requires. If getting someone productive depends on more tribal knowledge than documentation — if “ask Sarah, she knows how that actually works” is a normal sentence in the business — workarounds aren’t the exception anymore. They’re the operating model, and the org chart and process docs are just the story the business tells about itself.
What This Looks Like Day to Day
- Three people doing the “same” process three genuinely different ways, each convinced their version is standard.
- A critical piece of institutional knowledge that exists in exactly one person’s head, undocumented.
- Leadership discovering a workaround only when the person who built it goes on leave, and something quietly breaks in their absence.
- New hires learning “how things really work” from a colleague in week one, because the official process doesn’t match reality.
The Fix Isn’t Banning Workarounds
Banning workarounds outright just drives them underground — the incentive to patch quietly and move on doesn’t disappear, it just loses its visibility. The better fix is a genuinely low-friction way to surface a workaround the moment it’s created: a two-line note, a tagged Slack channel, anything faster than a form. The goal is turning “this broke, I patched it, someone should fix the real thing” into a five-second habit, not a permanent silent patch nobody else ever sees.
A workaround is a promise to fix something later that almost nobody keeps.
If your best people are your biggest workaround generators, your operations aren’t being run. They’re being personally carried.
Every workaround your team quietly builds is a compliment to their competence and a debt against your operations, at the same time. The businesses that scale cleanly aren’t the ones with zero workarounds — that’s not realistic. They’re the ones where a workaround gets seen the day it’s built, instead of the day it finally breaks in front of a customer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are workarounds always bad?
No. A workaround built to solve a genuine, one-off gap is a reasonable and often necessary response. The risk is when workarounds become the default way gaps get handled, invisibly, instead of the exception.
How do you get workarounds surfaced instead of hidden?
Make flagging one faster and lower-friction than staying silent about it — a quick note or tagged channel rather than a formal process — so surfacing a patch becomes a habit, not extra work.
What’s the risk of ignoring workaround creep?
Institutional knowledge concentrates in individuals rather than the business, onboarding slows as tribal knowledge outweighs documentation, and failures appear suddenly when the person carrying a workaround is unavailable.
Related reading: The Kinked Curve: Reading Your Own Revenue Chart.
If your operations run on a few people’s tribal knowledge more than on documented process, the Curve Diagnostic will show you exactly how exposed that makes your next quarter.
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