One of humanity's greatest strengths is our ability to adapt.
For thousands of years, adaptability has helped us survive changing environments, scarce resources, disasters, and conflicts. When something gets in our way, we figure out how to keep moving forward.
It's also why my dad once owned a car without a functioning gas pedal.
He was a teenager with limited resources for fixing cars, so of course it made sense.
This car had a manual transmission, no power steering, the wipers didn’t work, and the heat could only be turned on by opening the hood.
He rigged up a contraption involving a coat hanger and proceeded to drive the car by managing the hanger, the steering wheel, the clutch, the brake, the wipers, the hood, and the gear shift all at the same time.
Adaptability is wonderful when your goal is to survive (or get to class on time).
The problem comes when what you do to adapt in the moment becomes the permanent solution.
I once sat down with a member of a back-office finance team, we’ll call him John, to walk through his process. John was steady, careful, and had been doing this for a long time. John described his steps to me as follows:
“So, I open the spreadsheet and delete the first few lines, because otherwise it messes things up. Then I look for anything that starts with a ‘T’. Those go to a different team, so I move those out. After that, I copy everything into the other sheet. That's the one we use to load stuff, but I have to delete a few columns first. If I don’t, the thing freezes. Then I check the totals with my desk calculator, because sometimes the numbers don’t really come out right. Then I have to ask Stacy to look at my spreadsheet, because sometimes her stuff overlaps mine..."
John had adapted the process this way because he was dedicated to getting his work done correctly and did the best he could with the resources and training he had.
I've seen this happen in organizations of every size. They’re always clever solutions to real issues.
The problem comes when the “clever solution to fix a current pain point” becomes “the permanent way we do things here.”
Add more “clever solutions” on top of the current “clever solutions” and you end up needing an archeologist to find the ancient civilization that was the original process.
To John, this was just “what you did,” and I’m pretty sure he’ll train the next person in the same way.
This is called the normalization of dysfunction.
The workarounds become the process, and the real problem is never solved because nobody remembers that there’s supposed to be a gas pedal.
Dysfunction isn’t scalable. Like I wrote in the Warning Signs guide, once you add volume, complexity, and/or pressure, dysfunction becomes nonfunction.
As you think about your own organization, ask yourself this: where might you have forgotten that you were supposed to have a gas pedal?
