When the Workaround Becomes the Process.
Spend enough time inside a broken system and the breaks stop feeling like breaks.
The generator that runs four hours a day becomes the power situation. The bank that needs six forms of documentation becomes just how banking works. The two-hour detour becomes the route. The workaround becomes the process.
Normalization isn’t a decision anyone makes. Nobody sits down and defends the broken design. It just requires time, repetition, and the absence of will to do the harder thing, because fixing it properly is, conveniently, always someone else’s job. Each time the workaround gets used instead, the path gets a little more worn. Eventually it isn’t a path around the problem. It’s the only road there is.
People adapt. The adaptation becomes invisible. The original design, the thing that made the adaptation necessary, disappears from view. We forget that it was ever supposed to be different, and we lose the aspiration along with the memory.
Power is the clearest version of this. The generator gets bought. The fixing stops. We complain, loudly and often, but the complaining is its own workaround, it lets us feel like we’re doing something about a problem we’ve quietly stopped trying to solve.
It shows up smaller too, in decisions nobody else ever sees. Something urgent needs the harder option, the one that takes more effort to arrange but actually solves the problem, and somebody quietly proposes the easier delay instead, dressed up as reasonable. You go along with it. Not because you couldn’t have pushed for the harder thing. Because pushing felt like more than the moment seemed to deserve.
What we don’t talk about is what this costs us beyond the obvious. The familiarity gives us grit, and grit we’re proud of. There’s a quiet pride in surviving the workaround, in being the kind of person who always finds a way. That pride is exactly what makes surrender so easy to mistake for maturity. It’s a very real exhaustion, fighting the same battle every day, and at some point putting the fight down stops feeling like giving up and starts feeling like wisdom.
But it’s a choice. And every system you’ve ever built is full of them. The manual reconciliation nobody’s automated. The Slack thread that’s actually the approval process. The spreadsheet quietly doing the job the software should be doing. None of those started as the plan. Each one was supposed to be temporary, a patch while something better got built. Most of them never got replaced, because replacing them was never anyone’s most urgent problem, until the workaround was simply how the product worked, and nobody could point to when that happened.
How many of your “that’s just how it works” are actually a nation, a team, a product, deciding, one invisible adaptation at a time, never to fix anything again?
These reflections sit alongside a lingering body of work in progress, The Emergent Economy, which explores how systems form before institutions notice them.
Source: ADIA SOWHO/Leap of Scale
