In the winter of , a signalman working the northern lines of the English railway found himself at odds with the very clockwork that defined his life. The new interlocking lever system, a marvel of Victorian engineering intended to prevent human error, had a fatal flaw: the iron rods would contract and seize in the biting frost of the Pennines.
To keep the trains moving, the signalman began keeping a small, unauthorized bucket of hot coals beneath the primary junction box. It was a breach of fire safety, a violation of the company’s “Clean Platform” mandate, and a brilliant, localized solution to a systemic failure.
The inspector cited the signalman for negligence. Within forty-eight hours, the levers froze, a mail train overshot its mark, and the resulting wreckage cost the railway more than a thousand signalmen’s salaries.
Extinguishing the Coals in Modern Cubicles
We see this same “extinguishing of the coals” every day in modern cubicles and remote Slack channels. I spent years training therapy animals, and the first thing you learn is that a “bad” behavior-a dog barking at a window or a cat scratching a specific chair-is rarely about malice.
It is a communication of an unmet need or an environmental stressor. If you punish the bark without addressing the mailman or the squirrel, the stress just finds a new, often more destructive, outlet. Corporate environments are no different. When an auditor finds an unauthorized spreadsheet, they are looking at a behavioral symptom of a broken tool.
The spreadsheet in question usually belongs to someone like Sarah or Jim. Sarah and Jim are the ones who actually make the wheels turn when the official software grinds to a halt. In this specific instance, the company’s ticketing system was a generalist’s nightmare.
It was designed to handle everything from HR complaints to lightbulb replacements, which meant it handled the nuanced, high-stakes world of authenticity disputes with the grace of a sledgehammer. When a customer called in, frantic because their device didn’t feel “right,” the official system had no field for batch numbers, no way to track flavor-profile inconsistencies, and no method for side-by-side comparison.
Sarah and Jim did what any competent human would do: they built a workaround.
Because the auditor only sees the spreadsheet as a violation of protocol, he misses the fact that the protocol itself is a violation of the staff’s time. The spreadsheet lived on a shared drive, a quiet rebel, tracking the very things the official system ignored.
It was a localized ecosystem of truth, which is also how a dog learns that a specific floorboard creak means a walk is imminent; the dog isn’t following the “official” schedule of the house, but the reality of the environment.
This spreadsheet was a digital reef, built slowly by the calcification of daily frustrations, providing a home for the data that had no place to rest in the barren, sandy bottom of the official software.
7 Structural Truths Auditors Consistently Miss
Priority of “clean” audits over functional reality usually leads to these seven blind spots.
1. The Workaround is a Living Bug Report
Every time an employee opens an Excel sheet to track something that should be in the CRM, they are writing a bug report. They aren’t doing it because they love manual data entry. They are doing it because the official path is blocked.
In my training sessions, if a dog refuses to go through a specific door, I don’t just drag him through it. I look for the loose floorboard or the scent of a hidden predator. A workaround is a signal that the official process has a “loose floorboard.” Deleting the spreadsheet without fixing the software is like painting over a crack in a foundation and calling the house “renovated.”
2. Efficiency is Often the Enemy of “Auditability”
Auditors love a single source of truth, but they often mistake “single” for “simple.” The official system was simple-too simple. It couldn’t handle the complexity of verifying whether a product was a genuine article or a clever imitation.
Contextual Reality: Specialized Retail
In specialized retail, like when an adult customer is meticulously comparing
they need more than a generic “order number.” They need to know they are getting the exact puff capacity and flavor profile they expected.
When the official system fails to provide that granularity, the workaround fills the gap. Sarah can answer their question in thirty seconds because she has the data at her fingertips.
3. The Cost of “Compliance” is Hidden in the Burnout
“I thought he was being stubborn about his ‘down’ command… I later discovered he had a deep-seated ear infection that made lowering his head painful.”
– Memory of Buster the Labrador
I was so focused on the protocol of the “down” that I ignored the suffering of the animal. This is what happens when an audit kills a workaround. The staff is forced back into a broken system that takes three times as long to use.
The “tax” of this compliance isn’t paid by the auditor; it’s paid by the employee who has to stay late to manually fix the errors the official tool created.
4. Specialization Reduces the Need for Shadow IT
The reason these workarounds exist is usually that the tools provided are too broad. A generalist store that sells everything from electronics to groceries will always have a broken backend because one size fits none.
Conversely, a specialist who focuses on a single brand-knowing every flavor from “Blueberry P&B” to “Strawberry Ice”-can build a system that actually works. When the catalog is curated and the data is deep, the “workaround” becomes the “official process.”
5. Deleting the Symptom Leaves the Disease
When the auditor, let’s call him Henderson, shut down Sarah and Jim’s sheet, he felt a sense of accomplishment. The “unauthorized data silo” was gone. The security boxes were checked. But the reason for the silo-the inability to track authenticity disputes-remained.
Data from three weeks after the spreadsheet was forcibly deleted.
Customers were receiving the wrong versions of devices because the ticketing system couldn’t distinguish between the “Turbo” and “PRO” lines effectively. The “disease” of data inadequacy was still there; it just no longer had a “symptom” (the spreadsheet) to warn anyone it was killing the business.
6. Trust is the Only Infrastructure That Doesn’t Break
An audit is essentially an admission of a lack of trust. While some level of oversight is necessary, an audit that ignores the why of a workaround is an act of aggression against the staff’s agency.
In animal training, the “bond” is the infrastructure. If the dog trusts you, they will try to understand what you want even when the cues are muddy. If you break that trust by punishing their attempts to solve a problem (like the spreadsheet), they stop trying. They become “disengaged,” which is just a corporate word for “learned helplessness.”
7. The “Official” Record is Often a Lie
Perhaps the most dangerous part of killing workarounds is that it forces the “failure” off the books. As long as Sarah and Jim had their spreadsheet, the problems were being tracked, even if unofficially.
Once the sheet was gone, they had to start “winging it.” They stopped recording the nuances of the disputes because the official system made it too hard. On paper, the audit made the company look “cleaner.”
In reality, the company became “blind.” A clean audit trail that leads to a cliff is worse than a messy trail that leads to the truth.
The spreadsheet is a tourniquet made of cells, used to stop the bleeding that the official bandages were never designed to cover.
Watching the Stove: A Call to Observation
We have to stop treating our employees like malfunctioning machines and start treating them like the signalman with the coals. They aren’t trying to be “unauthorized.” They are trying to keep the trains from crashing.
The next time you find a “shadow” process in your organization, don’t reach for the extinguisher. Reach for a chair, sit down with the people who built it, and ask them what the “frost” is that they are trying to melt.
If you find that your staff is building a separate catalog just to keep track of different device capacities or flavor families, that isn’t a rebellion. It is a roadmap. It tells you exactly where your official “map” has failed.
“In my grandmother’s day, you didn’t need an audit to tell you the stove was hot; you just watched where people didn’t put their hands.”
We would do well to return to that level of observation. Instead of forcing everyone to use the “authorized” broken stove, maybe it’s time we finally fixed the heating element. Only then will the workarounds-and the buckets of coals-finally become unnecessary.