--- title: "Two for One: Why Workarounds Become the Real Process" description: "Why capable people route around the official process — and two levers: treat every workaround as a defect report, then close the gap for real." image: https://blog.noreja.com/hubfs/blog/featured-images/2026-10-27-two-for-one-workarounds.png --- [Skip to content](https://blog.noreja.com/en/why-workarounds-become-the-real-process#main-content) ![](https://blog.noreja.com/hs-fs/hubfs/blog/featured-images/2026-10-27-two-for-one-workarounds.png?width=1820&height=1024&name=2026-10-27-two-for-one-workarounds.png) Two-For-One GenAI BPM # Two for One: Why Workarounds Become the Real Process ![Lukas Pfahlsberger](https://app.hubspot.com/settings/avatar/6b6ceb34347ba3ac2667e67af4e9f63f) Lukas Pfahlsberger October 27, 2026 There is a shortcut worn into the lawn of almost every office park, running diagonally across the grass where the paved path curves the long way around. Nobody planned it, everybody uses it, and the groundskeeper reseeds it every spring. Your processes have the same paths — and like the lawn, they tell you something precise about where the official route is wrong. ## Why Capable People Build Workarounds A workaround is not a discipline problem. It is what happens when someone is accountable for an outcome and the official path does not get them there in time. The spreadsheet kept beside the ERP, the approval obtained by phone and documented afterwards, the order entered under a different category because the right one triggers a three-day check — each of these is a competent person solving the problem they were actually given. What makes them proliferate is that the two things a company measures pull in opposite directions. People are judged on results — the case closed, the customer served, the month closed on time. They are rarely judged on the route. So when the process blocks the result, the route gives way. That is not a moral failure; it is the predictable outcome of measuring outcomes. The second driver is silence. Reporting a workaround costs the person something: attention, possibly a discussion about compliance, quite possibly a new control that makes their work harder. Saying nothing costs them nothing. So the organisation's most precise information about where its processes fail sits in the heads of the people who route around them, and never travels upward. The result is a gap between the documented process and the executed one that widens quietly for years. Two levers close it — and neither of them starts with enforcing the official path. ## When the Shadow Process Becomes the Real One Past a certain point, the workarounds stop being deviations and become the actual operating model. You can recognise the state without any analysis. New joiners are trained in two versions of the process: the one in the documentation and the one that works. A key spreadsheet has a name everyone knows and no owner in any system. Month-end depends on one person's routine that exists in no procedure. When someone asks how a case is really handled, the answer starts with "officially…". At that stage the organisation is running on infrastructure it cannot see. The shadow process carries real volume, but it has no error handling, no access management, no continuity plan and no audit trail. It works because experienced people maintain it in their heads. It fails silently when one of them is unavailable, and it fails completely when they leave. There is a further effect that is easy to miss: the official process stops improving. Because the pain is absorbed by workarounds, the pressure that would normally force a redesign never reaches anyone with the authority to act. Everyone copes, so nothing changes — the documentation drifts further from reality, and the gap between them becomes accepted as normal. That is the pattern we described in the edition on [processes that exist only on paper](https://blog.noreja.com/en/processes-exist-only-on-paper?hsLang=en). ## The Hidden Costs of Living With Workarounds The obvious cost is duplicated effort — data typed twice, reconciliations between the official system and the real one. It is measurable and it is the smallest item. The first serious cost is fragility. A workaround has no redundancy by construction. The spreadsheet lives on one laptop, the phone approval depends on one relationship, the workaround for the broken interface is known to three people. Every one of these is a single point of failure that appears in no risk register, precisely because it appears in no documentation. The second is that measurement becomes fiction. If a third of cases take a route the systems do not record, then cycle times, volumes and error rates all describe a process that is not the one running. Decisions get made on those numbers — capacity planning, automation projects, tool purchases — and they are calibrated to a fiction. Automating a documented process while a third of reality runs elsewhere produces expensive disappointment. The third is compliance exposure, and it is the one that turns a workaround into a headline. A control that is bypassed in practice provides no protection, but it does provide documentation claiming protection exists. That combination is worse than having no control, because it removes the incentive to build one that works. The diagnosis matters for the remedy: this is a structural problem, not a behavioural one. The people building workarounds are doing exactly what the incentive system asks. Enforcement campaigns — audits, reminders, new controls — treat the symptom and reliably drive the behaviour further underground, where it is harder to see and just as expensive. ## Two Practical Levers The first lever changes what happens when a workaround surfaces, so that it surfaces at all. The second converts what you learn into a process people no longer need to route around. ### Lever 1: Treat Every Workaround as a Defect Report, Not a Violation The most valuable process information in your organisation is currently unreported, because reporting it is punished and hiding it is free. Invert that, deliberately and visibly. In practice: open a short amnesty. Ask teams to describe the shortcuts they use, guarantee explicitly that nothing collected will be used against anyone, and make the collection concrete — which step, what you do instead, what would happen if you followed the official route. Two rules make the difference between an exercise and a source of truth. Nobody is asked to stop using their workaround during the collection; the goal is information, not compliance. And every submission gets a response — even "we are keeping this as it is, and here is why" — because the fastest way to kill the channel is silence. What comes back is a ranked list of exactly where your process does not fit reality, produced by the people with the best view of it. It is more precise than any process audit, and it costs a fraction. Expect a few uncomfortable findings; those are the valuable ones. And treat the pattern rather than the instance: five people doing the same workaround is not five problems but one design fault with five witnesses. Reporting alone is a weak signal though, because the workarounds people mention are not necessarily the ones that matter most. Combine it with measurement: process mining reconstructs the executed paths from system timestamps and shows which deviations carry real volume, how long they take, and whether they end worse. Platforms such as [noreja](https://topai.tools/t/noreja) add the causal layer, which answers the question that decides what to do next — is this variant driven by a customer segment, a product type, a specific system state? A workaround used in eighteen percent of cases and always at the same trigger is not chaos. It is an undocumented rule, and it can be designed. ### Lever 2: Close the Gap Where It Is, Not on Paper Once a workaround is visible, there are exactly three honest responses, and picking one deliberately is the whole lever. Adopt it. If the shortcut is better than the official route and carries no real risk, make it the process. This is the most common correct answer and the least often chosen, because it means admitting the design was wrong. It is also the cheapest improvement available: the new process is already tested, already trained, already in use. Legalise it as an exception path. If the shortcut is right for a specific class of cases but not in general, define that class precisely — a value threshold, a customer type, a system state — and build a short official route for it. This keeps the standard path clean instead of loading it with conditions, which is the same reasoning behind separating standard cases from exceptions when [simplifying a process](https://blog.noreja.com/en/why-simplifying-is-harder-than-adding?hsLang=en). Or fix the cause and remove the need. If the workaround exists because a system field is unreliable, an interface fails silently, or a check takes three days for no current reason, address that. This is the most expensive response and sometimes the only correct one — but be honest about the timeline. A workaround that will persist for another eighteen months while a project runs needs to be documented and made safe in the meantime, not declared forbidden and left in place. What is not on the list is enforcement without change. Telling people to follow a process that does not work removes the coping mechanism and leaves the problem, which produces a worse process and a quieter organisation. The principle to test both levers against: if your official process were followed exactly, by everyone, tomorrow — would your results get better or worse? If the honest answer is worse, the workarounds are not the problem. They are the correction. ## Food for Thought Which spreadsheet does your team depend on that exists in no system landscape and has no named owner? What do experienced colleagues tell new joiners about how things "really" work — and how far is that from the documentation? When someone last reported a workaround, what happened to them and to the process? Which of your controls are bypassed in practice, and what protection do you believe they provide? If your official process were followed exactly tomorrow, would your results improve or deteriorate? Which workaround in your organisation depends on one person being available? ## Conclusion: Read the Shortcut Instead of Reseeding the Lawn Workarounds are not evidence of undisciplined people; they are the most accurate feedback your process will ever get, produced for free by the people closest to the work. The organisations that stay slow are the ones that respond with enforcement, pushing the information underground while the gap between documented and executed keeps widening. The alternative is unglamorous and effective: make reporting safe, measure which deviations actually carry volume, and then decide honestly for each one whether to adopt it, legalise it as an exception, or fix the cause behind it. Do that, and the shadow process stops being a liability and becomes what it always was — a design proposal from the people who know. [Contact us](https://outlook.office365.com/book/Kennenlernen@noreja.com/?ismsaljsauthenabled=true) ## FAQ #### Why do employees create workarounds? Because they are accountable for outcomes and the official path does not deliver them in time. Organisations measure results, not routes, so when the process blocks the result the route gives way. Reporting the shortcut costs the individual something and staying silent costs nothing — which is why the information rarely travels upward. #### What is a shadow process? The set of undocumented routes that carry real volume alongside the official process — spreadsheets beside the ERP, approvals by phone, categories chosen to avoid a slow check. It works because experienced people maintain it, and it has no error handling, access management, continuity plan or audit trail. #### What do workarounds actually cost? Duplicated effort is the smallest item. The serious costs are fragility (single points of failure that appear in no risk register), unusable measurement (cycle times describing a process that is not the one running, which misleads capacity and automation decisions), and compliance exposure from controls that are documented but bypassed. #### How should a company respond when it finds a workaround? With one of three deliberate answers: adopt it as the new process if it is better and safe, legalise it as an exception path for a precisely defined class of cases, or fix the underlying cause. Enforcement without change is not on the list — it removes the coping mechanism, leaves the problem, and pushes the behaviour out of sight. #### How does process mining help with workarounds? Self-reporting reveals which shortcuts people are willing to mention; process mining shows which deviations actually carry volume. Reconstructing executed paths from system timestamps reveals how often a variant occurs, how long it takes, and whether it ends worse — and causal analysis shows what triggers it, which is what turns a workaround into a designable rule. ## Share this post [mailto:https%3A%2F%2Fblog.noreja.com%2Fen%2Fwhy-workarounds-become-the-real-process](mailto:https%3A%2F%2Fblog.noreja.com%2Fen%2Fwhy-workarounds-become-the-real-process) ## Keep reading ### [![](https://blog.noreja.com/hs-fs/hubfs/blog/featured-images/2026-10-20-quick-tips-simplifying-processes.png?width=1820&height=1024&name=2026-10-20-quick-tips-simplifying-processes.png) Quick Tips GenAI BPM Quick Tips: Why Simplifying Is Harder Than Adding](https://blog.noreja.com/en/why-simplifying-is-harder-than-adding?hsLang=en) ### [![](https://blog.noreja.com/hs-fs/hubfs/blog/featured-images/2026-10-13-business-case-campaign-approvals.png?width=1820&height=1024&name=2026-10-13-business-case-campaign-approvals.png) GenAI BPM Process Intelligence Business Case: How to Cut Campaign Approval Time](https://blog.noreja.com/en/cut-campaign-approval-time?hsLang=en) [![noreja\_logo\_white](https://blog.noreja.com/hs-fs/hubfs/noreja_logo_white.png?width=300&height=78&name=noreja_logo_white.png "noreja_logo_white")](https://blog.noreja.com/?hsLang=en) [Privacy Policy](https://noreja.com/en/privacy) · [Legal](https://noreja.com/en/imprint) · © 2026 Noreja. 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