Someone built a workaround once. A quick fix — a copied spreadsheet, a manual step inserted between two systems that wouldn’t talk to each other, a Tuesday morning email that triggered the next phase.
It worked. The immediate problem disappeared.
Then the person who built it moved on. Nobody documented why it existed. The systems around it changed, or were replaced, or were upgraded. But the workaround stayed. Because it worked, and changing things that work feels risky.
Six months later, new people are following the process without knowing it was never meant to be a process. They’re maintaining it carefully. Training others on it. Getting frustrated when someone skips a step.
This is how most operational debt actually accumulates — not through neglect, but through competence. Someone solved a real problem well enough that the solution became invisible infrastructure.
Scott Andrew Alpaugh has seen this pattern across systems of every size: the workaround that calcified into policy, the manual step nobody can explain but everyone protects.
The tell is simple. Ask why a step exists. If the answer is “it’s always been done this way” or “I’m not sure, but don’t skip it” — you’re looking at a workaround that outlived its reason.
That’s not necessarily wrong. Sometimes the reason is still valid. But you should know which one you’re dealing with.
Systems built on forgotten reasoning are fragile. They break in ways nobody predicts, because nobody remembers what they were actually holding together.