Why workarounds harm user trust and team morale

Every 'just make it work' moment leaves a scar. That scar is design debt. Design debt in ITSM isn’t about buttons or code, it’s the invisible drag that slows every project, burns out your best people, and erodes trust one ticket at a time. Most IT leaders don't see it until their best people are drowning in tickets that should never have existed. It hides in plain sight — not as broken systems, but as subtle friction that builds up over years. Here are the five hidden stages of service design debt—and how they quietly drag down trust and capacity: 🚩 Legacy Logic – “It still works” thinking hides outdated workflows. 🚩 Shadow Processes – Workarounds become permanent without anyone noticing. 🚩 Friction Creep – Approvals and steps accumulate without adding value. 🚩 Trust Erosion – Delays and confusion quietly undermine confidence. 🚩 Zombie Workflows – Obsolete flows keep consuming capacity. If you’re seeing even two of these, design debt is already taxing your outcomes. It doesn't crash apps, it quietly kills trust, capacity, and morale. And most teams already know what's broken. What they lack is a systematic way to fix it without ripping everything out. Here's how Grove leaders tackle service design debt: 1. Audit reality, not documentation ↳ Document what's actually happening. Which workflows are active? Which are zombies? 2. Map intended vs. real work ↳ Shadow your team. You'll uncover workarounds, shadow processes, and off-system requests hiding in plain sight. 3. Separate friction from value ↳Every approval, form field, and escalation step must either reduce risk or add value. If it doesn't, it's friction. 4. Prioritize by impact ↳Not all debt is equal. Start with what's generating the most tickets, delays, or escalations. The Grove Method provides a framework for this work. helping you rebuild workflows around today's realities, not yesterday's assumptions. Fixing service design debt isn’t about cleaning up workflows, it’s about reclaiming capacity and accelerating business outcomes. 💭 What's one workflow you'd redesign tomorrow if you had the buy-in? 🔔 Follow Bob Roark for Grove Method strategies that turn friction into flow.

Ask any founder about their biggest failure, and they’ll point to the obvious one. Big failures get headlines. But the real collapse rarely gets noticed. Products rarely die from a single mistake. They bleed out in silence every time trust is traded for a shortcut. Betray your best users, lose your edge. Your earliest adopters do more than provide feedback or cheer from the sidelines. They troubleshoot, stretch your product, and set new expectations. When their needs go unmet, or when you break their workflows, you are losing the resilience that keeps your product alive in tough moments. Most teams only notice the damage after the fact, when those users are already gone. How you end matters as much as how you launch. Product migrations and sunsets are never just technical. Every missed detail, whether it’s a broken export, a lost file, or a confusing transition, creates another fracture in user trust. The companies that get this right pay attention to the small stuff and respect what users built with them. The ones that treat it as a checklist always leave a mess behind. A clean, clear ending tells your customers that their time and work mattered. Chasing breadth, losing depth. Expanding into new markets or adding features can look like progress. What usually happens is you lose the discipline and detail that made people care in the first place. Winning new jobs means putting in more effort, not less. Most teams spread themselves thin and become forgettable. The teams that win stay focused long enough to build depth users can’t find anywhere else. Friction is a slow exit. Forced signups and hidden paywalls push users to start searching for alternatives, even if they don’t leave right away. The short-term gains from adding friction almost always come at the cost of long-term loyalty. In the end, trust is what keeps people around. Lose it, and all you’ve done is start a countdown for your competitors. The pattern repeats: The slow decline of a product begins each time trust is traded for a shortcut or a quick win. Protect user trust as fiercely as you fight for every launch or metric. The best teams never make their top users regret the energy or belief they put into the product.

The checkbox is complete. But the trust is gone. Three months after go-live, I'm sitting across from a project manager who's confused. Her ServiceNow implementation hit every milestone. "We delivered on time and under budget," she said. I looked at the portal analytics. The usage graph was so flat it looked like a heart monitor after... well, you get it. "So why is adoption at 3%?" I asked. She pulled up her project plan. Every checkbox ticked: Requirements ✓ Configuration ✓ Training ✓ Go-live ✓ Flawless execution. Complete failure. The truth emerged in the break room, where honesty lives. Coffee chat with employees. "Oh yes, I remember that mandatory training during month-end close" one accountant laughed. "I logged in, muted it, and kept working." "The portal?" An engineer shrugged. "Took me 20 minutes to find the right form. My Excel sheet takes 2." "They asked for our input," someone from procurement added. "Then built exactly what IT wanted anyway." The project team had celebrated with cake and LinkedIn posts. Even won an internal innovation award. Meanwhile, employees had already built three different workarounds. The trust account wasn't just empty - it was overdrawn. Because here's the thing about trust in GBS: You don't lose it when systems fail. Systems fail all the time. People understand that. You lose it when you pretend a failure is a success. When you force training during their busiest week. When you measure everything except whether you actually helped anyone. When you declare victory while they're drowning in your "solution." Organizations burn through millions in "successful" implementations. Each one adding another layer of scar tissue. Another reason to resist the next change. Just flip the script: - Co-design with employees, not for them - Pilot with volunteers, not prisoners - Measure trust alongside timelines - Fix what broke people, not processes Implementation delivers checkboxes. Experience delivers believers. Your next project will succeed on paper. But will anyone trust you enough to use it? 💡 Trust is your most expensive asset. One careless implementation can bankrupt it. 🔥 Prioritize experience. What's the trust balance in your organization right now?

We created a Microsoft Teams chat to communicate with our colleagues. Here’s why that terrifies me: Such asynchronous communication might sound like a great development. But, in this case, it’s a sign of a deep problem in healthcare. Last week, I needed to admit a patient from the ER. She couldn't stand without assistance, needed a wheelchair that would take days to arrange, and had no family support at home. When I called the hospitalist to discuss admission, I hit the usual pushback: "Can you keep her a few more hours? Wait for social work in the morning?" The hospitalist was making decisions about a real person's safety without ever seeing her. Conversations like these became so contentious that hospitals created a workaround: text chains through Microsoft Teams. No more direct conversation. When I mentioned it to a colleague, she said: "This is much better. Now we don't have to get into arguments with anybody. We don't have to talk to people." We are so contentious with each other that the best way not to be contentious is not to talk to each other. Think about that. Instead of fixing our relationships, we've designed systems that eliminate verbal or in-person connection entirely. The most efficient system would be calling a colleague I trust and saying "This person needs help." We only need Microsoft Teams workarounds because we've let relationships become so fractured that basic human communication feels impossible. Technology should enhance human connection, not replace it.

🔧 Short-term fixes have a way of becoming permanent. I once walked through a production line and noticed a temporary employee inspecting bottles by hand. When I asked why, I learned that a “short-term” fix had been put in place months earlier after an airtight solution had already been implemented. The manual inspection was no longer necessary—but no one had ever gone back to remove it. This happens far too often. A workaround is added in the heat of the moment, but because it “works,” it stays. Over time, the short-term fix becomes part of the process, consuming resources and hiding the real solution. 👉 Leaders must go back, review, and replace short-term fixes with sustainable countermeasures. Otherwise, we create waste and erode trust in the system. Ask yourself: • Where in your processes are people still doing “temporary” workarounds? • What short-term fixes have quietly become long-term habits? Continuous improvement isn’t just about solving problems—it’s about ensuring the solutions are the right ones. #ContinuousImprovement #Leadership #LeanThinking #ProblemSolving

Most workflow “emergencies” aren’t emergencies. They’re design failures. Last week, I asked a team lead: “Why is everyone working late again?” The answer? “We're chasing a report that’s always needed by 9 am, but it's never built into the plan.” Sound familiar? In energy and engineering teams, these patterns show up everywhere: • 🔁 Rebuilding slides every month from scratch • 📩 Inbox archaeology to find the right version of a forecast • 📉 Running meetings to prepare for other meetings None of these are malicious. But each one silently eats: – Time – Headspace – Trust in the system 💡 The fix isn’t more process. It’s one workflow redesign at a time and grounded in how your team actually works, not how it should work in theory. 🎯 Start here: What’s the most annoying task your team does more than twice a week? That’s the one to automate, standardise, or eliminate first. 📎 Save this if you’re firefighting every Friday. ♻️ Repost if you know a team burning hours on workarounds that shouldn’t exist. ➕ Follow me, Nick, for practical fixes that save time, trust, and team energy.

Most digital transformation projects don’t fail due to implementation issues. They fail in silence when users quietly return to Excel. This is the uncomfortable truth behind most digital transformation projects. The software goes live, the email goes out, and within 90 days, your most experienced people are performing a Silent Rebellion. They are not complaining, but they are using WhatsApp for approvals, copying data into spreadsheets, or relying on paper logs. Why? Because the tool failed to earn their trust. Here are four ways tools lose user trust: (1) The "Accuracy Cliff" of New Data You launch an AI document processing system like YellowChunks. The first hundred documents are perfect. The next one, an oddly formatted invoice, breaks the model. The lie is that 98 percent accuracy is good enough. The reality is that one mistake makes users double-check everything. Trust drops to zero. (2) The Black Box Diagnosis An AI tool like BODHI flags a major component failure but gives no reasoning. The lie is that the AI knows best. The reality is that engineers will not act without proof. If they cannot see vibration logs or temperature spikes, they will run their own manual checks. (3) The Workflow Detour You deploy a voice AI like VirtuAI to improve call queues. But agents must click through six screens to tag a call. The lie is that the process was mapped correctly. The reality is that agents find faster shortcuts, and your data quality suffers. (4) The Cannot Fix My Own Mistake Barrier An employee makes a small entry error. To fix it, they must raise a ticket that takes 48 hours. The lie is that layered security ensures control. The reality is that users need flexibility. If they cannot correct simple mistakes, they will build their own workarounds in Excel. AI adoption is 20 percent technology and 80 percent trust. If your system does not deliver accuracy, transparency, and respect for how people actually work, the rebellion has already begun. Leaders, what was the biggest reason your last software rollout failed to achieve full adoption? #DigitalTransformation #ChangeManagement #AIAdoption #YellowChunks #BODHI #VirtuAI #Approlabs

When complex systems don’t evolve, users adapt in ways that aren’t always safe. We’ve seen it all: → Teams using external spreadsheets because systems can’t handle complex workflows. → Clinicians copying sensitive information to personal notes for quick access. → Users relying on personal task management apps when built-in tools are inadequate. → Departments maintaining manual logs to track information the system doesn't capture. These workarounds seem like time-savers but introduce security and privacy risks that your system was designed to prevent. The best solution? A UX strategy that works within your system’s limitations, planning for consistent, careful improvements. Risk doesn’t end with your platform — it ends with user behavior. #UXLeadership #HealthTech #HealthcareDesign #DesignLeadership #UXStrategy #InnovateWithUX