When Workarounds Become the Way the Business Runs — Altvina Altvina Insights

Published June 8, 2026 · Altvina Insights · 4 min read

When Workarounds Become the Way the Business Runs

Side spreadsheets, private notes, the reminder one person sends every week. They start as small fixes and quietly become how the work actually gets done. Here is how to tell when a workaround has stopped helping and started hiding a problem.

Every business runs on a few workarounds.

The shared doc someone keeps because the real system is clumsy. The reminder one person sends every week because nothing else catches it. The message that has to happen before a handoff will actually go through.

None of that is a problem on its own. A workaround is just a person solving the problem in front of them with whatever is close to hand. Most of the time that is a good instinct, and the people doing it are some of your best.

The thing worth watching is not the first workaround. It is the moment a workaround becomes the way the work gets done.

Why teams build workarounds in the first place

People do not invent side systems for fun. They build them because the real one is slow, unclear, or missing a step, and the work still has to move today.

So someone keeps a private list. Someone else holds the real status in their head. A third person becomes the unofficial place you go when you need something to actually happen. For a while, it works. The business keeps moving and nobody has to stop and fix anything.

That is exactly why it is easy to miss.

When a workaround becomes a warning sign

One person with a clever shortcut is fine. The signal is when everyone has their own version of it.

When each person has a different spreadsheet, a different way of tracking the same thing, a different reminder they set for themselves, the business no longer has one way of working. It has several of them running side by side, and they line up about as often as you would expect, which is to say not always.

That is the business telling you something. Not that the people are doing it wrong. That the real system is not carrying the work, so the people are carrying it instead.

What workarounds actually cost you

The cost is rarely a dramatic failure. It is slower and harder to see.

First, the hidden labor. The reminders, the double-checking, the side lists. Real hours, spent by your most capable people, that never show up as a task anywhere.

Then there is the drift. When the process lives in several heads, the work comes out several slightly different ways, and the gaps surface at the worst moments.

And the part nobody likes to think about: the week your one person is out with the flu, you find out exactly how much was riding on them.

How to take a clear look this week

You do not need a project to start. You need an honest list.

Ask your team a simple question: what do you do to keep your work moving that is not really part of the official process? The side doc. The reminder. The person you message first. Write down every answer.

Then look for the ones more than one person named. Those are not bad habits. They are a map of where the business is not carrying the work yet, drawn by the people who feel it every day.

And the shape of the workaround tells you what kind of gap it is. A side spreadsheet is a trust gap: people do not believe the real record. The same question asked over and over is a documentation gap: the answer is not written anywhere people trust. A decision that always waits for one person is an authority gap: nobody is sure they are allowed to call it. A follow-up that only happens because someone remembers is a handoff gap: the system drops the baton, so a person catches it.

You are not just listing annoyances. You are reading a diagnosis your team already wrote, for free, in the things they do to get through the day.

That list is the first clear look. It tells you where work is getting stuck, and it usually points at what to fix first.

You can start that list yourself this week, with one question and a notepad. A Blueprint takes the same look much further: the full picture, the root causes, and a plan attached, so you are not left holding a list you are not sure how to read.

If you would rather have that clear look done in full, with a plan to act on, that is the Altvina Blueprint. A short fit call tells you whether it is the right next step: altvina.com/fit-call

Continue the series

This is part 1 of a 5-part series on The Workarounds Are the Warning Sign. The full arc:

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