The fluorescent hum of the training room is vibrating at a frequency that suggests the building itself wants to leave. I am currently 249 minutes into a session for our new ‘Synergy Flow’ portal, and my right index finger has developed a twitch that feels suspiciously like a rebellion. The trainer, a man whose enthusiasm is so polished it’s practically reflective, just informed us that submitting a simple expense report now requires a journey through 19 separate screens. It used to take four. But the data, he promises, will be ‘cleaner.’ My hand hurts. It’s the same dull ache I felt this morning when I spent nine minutes wrestling with a jar of pickles, only to admit defeat and put it back in the fridge, still sealed, a monument to my own inadequacy and the stubbornness of vacuum-sealed glass.

We assume that if we can just track the failure with 29 different KPIs, the failure will somehow become a metric we can manage, rather than a reality we have to inhabit.

The Physics of Mess: Braking vs. Steering

My driving instructor, a man named Finn N.S. who smells exclusively of wintergreen lifesavers and the interior of a 1989 sedan, once told me that most accidents happen because people try to steer through a mistake instead of just braking. He’d watch me over-correct on a slick patch of road, my hands white-knuckled on the wheel, and he’d sigh. ‘You’re trying to outsmart the physics of your own mess, Finn would say, clicking his tongue. ‘Just stop moving for a second.’ We don’t stop moving in the corporate world. We just buy a more expensive steering wheel that vibrates when we’re about to hit the wall.

“You’re trying to outsmart the physics of your own mess… Just stop moving for a second.”

Finn N.S. had a point that transcends the suburban streets of my youth. When a process is fundamentally broken-when the communication between departments is a series of passive-aggressive emails and missed deadlines-adding software is like putting a GPS on a car with no engine. You’ll know exactly where you aren’t going.

The Hidden Tax of Distrust

I’m thinking about that pickle jar again. The problem wasn’t the jar, and it wasn’t my hand. It was the friction. In our digital lives, we’ve mistaken more friction for more security, more data for more insight. We’ve built these 19-step workflows because we don’t trust the person on the other end of the screen to do their job without 49 digital guardrails. This lack of trust is the hidden tax of the modern workplace. We spend half our day proving we’re working to the machine, which leaves us exactly half a day to actually do the work. It’s a zero-sum game played on a high-resolution monitor.

I recall a specific project where we spent $499,000 on a ‘collaboration suite.’ Before the software, people would walk across the hall to ask a question. After the software, they would submit a ticket, wait 9 hours for a response, and then schedule a meeting to clarify the ticket. We didn’t collaborate more; we just documented our distance more efficiently. And we called it progress because the dashboard was blue and had a very nice font.

The Radical Act of Common Sense

Contrast this with a model that actually respects the physical reality of the problem it’s trying to solve. Look at Bathroom Remodel. In an industry that usually thrives on making customers drive to seven different warehouses to look at beige squares under flickering lights, they changed the physical process first. They didn’t just build a ‘flooring portal’ to make the annoyance digital; they brought the showroom to the front door.

I’ve made this mistake myself. I once tried to organize my entire life through a complex series of linked databases. I had 39 different categories for my books, 19 folders for my receipts, and a color-coded calendar that looked like a bag of Skittles exploded. I spent more time maintaining the system than I did living the life the system was supposed to organize. One day, the database crashed. I lost everything. And you know what? My life didn’t stop. The system was a hallucination of control.

The Hard Work of Simplicity

We need to stop buying tools to solve human problems. If your team isn’t talking, a chat app will only give them a faster way to ignore each other. The hard work is the conversation. The hard work is looking at the 19 clicks and asking, ‘What would happen if we just stopped doing 15 of these?’ The answer is usually ‘nothing,’ and that’s the scariest part for a middle manager with a budget to spend.

I finally got that pickle jar open, by the way. I didn’t use a special tool or a new ‘opening system.’ I just ran it under some warm water for 29 seconds to loosen the seal. I stopped fighting the friction and just changed the environment. There’s a lesson there for the next time someone tries to sell you a digital transformation that takes more clicks than the old way. Maybe the answer isn’t a more expensive jar opener. Maybe we just need to change the temperature of the room.

Digital transformation, as it’s currently sold, is the world’s most expensive invisibility cloak. It allows us to disappear into the data while the actual problems-the ones involving people, emotions, and the messy reality of the physical world-continue to fester just out of sight of the dashboard.