Your Company Has Two Operating Systems

Leadership approves a new system. There is a business case, a rollout plan, training, new procedures, perhaps months of implementation work.

By Angelena Bn | Chartered Managers Canada

Leadership approves a new system. There is a business case, a rollout plan, training, new procedures, perhaps months of implementation work. Eventually, the project is declared complete, and leadership moves on to the next priority. The system remains, people appear to be using it. Reports are being produced so the change must be working.

Maybe.

There may be another operating system running underneath the one leadership can see. It might be a spreadsheet maintained by someone in finance; a private tracker used by a department; a group chat where decisions happen before they enter the formal workflow; a manual process that survived the introduction of new software because employees still need it to get their work done.

Sometimes the unofficial system is barely visible. Sometimes it has become so normal that nobody thinks of it as unusual anymore, and that is where the problem can begin. The system leadership sees isn't always the system employees use.

Every organization has a designed way of working. There are processes, policies, platforms, reporting structures and approval paths that are supposed to move work from beginning to end. But organizations are made up of people, and people adapt.

When the formal process doesn't quite fit the work, employees find ways around the gap. A new platform may require information to be entered in a way that doesn't match how a team actually needs to use it. A reporting system may provide the required numbers while failing to provide the information a manager needs to make a decision. An approval process may be perfectly logical on paper while creating delays in the real world. So people compensate - they copy, they reconcile, they keep their own records. They send the message before submitting the request, they maintain the spreadsheet alongside the software, they create the workaround and then they get on with their day. From their perspective, this may not feel like resistance. It may simply feel like work.

Meet the Maverick

Every organization has a Maverick. Some have several. They are the people who know how to get things done when the official process gets in the way. One knows which spreadsheet actually contains the numbers everyone needs. Another knows which person to call when an approval is stuck. Someone else has developed a faster way to move information between two systems. They may all be highly capable people. They may all be solving real problems, and they may have no idea that anyone else has built a workaround. 

The Maverick is often valued because they get things done, and they should be. But there is another possibility worth considering - the Maverick may not be creating the workaround. They may be revealing the need for it.

When one Maverick becomes several. This is where things can become more complicated. One Maverick can look like an exceptional employee. Several Mavericks can create an unofficial operating system: Finance has its spreadsheet, operations has its tracker, sales has its workaround. A manager has a private reporting system. Each one may make perfect sense from the perspective of the person who created it. Together, they can create something that is harder to see.

The organization may still be functioning, people are still getting things done, deadlines are still being met. But they may not be getting the work done from the same information, through the same process, or with the same assumptions. Nobody necessarily intended this. There may be no grand rebellion against the corporate system. Instead, individual solutions accumulate - organized confusion.

The organization doesn't necessarily look broken. It looks busy. That distinction matters. The quiet cost of making the system work. A workaround isn't automatically bad; employees solve problems every day. Some shortcuts are sensible. Some eventually become improvements that should be incorporated into the formal process. The concern is when unofficial ways of working become persistent, widespread or necessary. At that point, the organization may believe it has standardized a process when it has standardized only the visible part of it.

• Leadership sees the software. Employees see the extra work required to make the software usable.
• Leadership sees one reporting process. Employees see the additional steps required to produce a report they can actually trust.
• Leadership sees a single source of truth. Employees may be maintaining another source because they have learned that the official one doesn't tell the whole story.

The cost doesn't necessarily appear as a line item. It appears as another 20 minutes of reconciliation, another spreadsheet, another meeting, another manual transfer between systems, another person who has become indispensable because they are the only one who knows how the unofficial process works.

The organization can end up paying for the official system and paying its people to compensate for the gaps in that system. The problem with measuring compliance. This becomes particularly interesting after a major technology or process change. Leadership can measure whether employees logged in, forms were completed, required fields were populated, reports were generated, or training was attended. From a management perspective, the implementation may look successful.

But those measures don't necessarily tell you whether the new system replaced the old way of working. Employees can comply with the official process while continuing to rely on unofficial processes to actually get the work done. The organization has measured implementation. It hasn't necessarily measured adoption.

That distinction can be easy to miss, particularly when people are good at compensating for problems. The better employees become at working around friction, the less visible the friction can become. The organization may be hiding its own signals.

Leaders naturally look at dashboards, reports, process maps and policies to understand how the organization operates. Those things matter, but they primarily describe the organization as it was designed.

The unofficial system can tell a different story. It can reveal where people have had to adapt. It can expose gaps between departments, it can reveal information that isn't moving as cleanly as leadership assumes. It can indicate that a technology investment has changed the official workflow without necessarily changing the way work actually happens. And it can show where individual solutions have accumulated into something larger than the original problem.

None of this means employees are doing something wrong. It means the organization may contain information that isn't visible in its formal systems. The Maverick may therefore be more than a high performer. They may be an organizational signal and when several Mavericks are solving different problems in different ways, those signals can become surprisingly difficult to see as a pattern. Look beneath the visible organization.

The question for leadership isn't whether employees ever create workarounds - they will. The more important question is whether those workarounds have become significant enough to affect how the organization actually operates.

That is much harder to see from a dashboard. It requires recognizing that an organization has both a designed system and a lived system. The two may be close together, or they may be very different. And the gap between them can contain some of the most useful information an organization has about its own friction. The answer isn't always another software purchase. It isn't always more training. It isn't always tighter compliance.

Sometimes the first step is recognizing that the system leadership believes it implemented - may not be the system employees are actually using. Leaders do not need to eliminate every workaround. Some are signs of creativity, initiative and problem-solving. The management challenge is recognizing when individual adaptations have become a hidden operating model for the organization.

The formal process tells you how work is supposed to happen. The unofficial process tells you how work has adapted to happen and when several Mavericks are quietly maintaining several versions of that unofficial process, the organization may be functioning on organized confusion.

How many Mavericks are holding your organization together, and what happens when their individual solutions collide?

About the Author:

I am a Friction Auditor specializing in 14-day virtual operational reviews for mid-market companies. I bring 18 years of remote leadership experience and 11 years of operational leadership, including serving as GM of Operations for a global, 500-member private-equity membership organization. My work focuses on identifying the hidden friction that slows execution, creates confusion, and costs organizations time and money.

Friction Auditor | Frictionless Corporate Advisory.
LinkedIn: Angelena Bn