The Tyranny of Steps

My left eye started twitching somewhere around the third hour of the mandatory 7-hour training call for Project Fusion. It wasn’t the content-that was pure, distilled mediocrity-it was the metallic taste of obligation, the understanding that I was watching a group of highly paid consultants explain how we would now be using 27 steps to achieve the same result that previously required five. The original five steps involved a paper form, a signature, and walking 47 feet to an inbox.

This is the cruel joke of modern digital transformation: we spent $2.7 million on software designed to ‘optimize’ our workflow, and the net result is that instead of printing and signing a physical form, I now download a non-editable PDF, fill in the fields, save it as a new file, encrypt it with my employee ID plus the current temperature divided by 7, and upload it to a server that requires two-factor authentication, which inevitably fails the first 7 attempts. It’s not transformation; it’s paper, digitized and encased in bureaucracy.

Artifacts vs. Actual Work

We confuse artifacts with work. We believe that if we can create a complex, networked system to track the expense report (the artifact), we have solved the problem of the expense (the work). We have not. The work is the negotiation, the judgment, the transfer of value, the trust between the person spending and the person approving. Technology, applied blindly to a broken or misunderstood human interaction, doesn’t fix it. It just erects a digital prison around the existing inefficiency, making the cell walls $2.7 million thicker.

I hate the word ‘solution’ because it implies a singular fix for a complex, living problem. Most ‘solutions’ are just ways of replacing one set of constraints with another, usually trading slowness for rigidity. Fusion promises the check in 7 minutes, but only if you perfectly execute the 27 required steps. If you miss one step… the system silently queues your request, sends you an automated rejection 7 days later, and provides no human contact point.

When we automate a bad process, we are effectively automating bad behavior and making it mandatory.

The Wisdom of Resistance

I’ve been thinking a lot about the people who resist this modernization push, not because they are anti-technology, but because they respect the deep, slow wisdom embedded in long-standing ways of working. They understand that complexity isn’t always the enemy, but needless complexity is a cancer. They preserve the proven method, the process that has stood the test of 47 generations, not because it’s easy, but because its rigor ensures quality. They understand the difference between efficiency (doing things right) and effectiveness (doing the right things).

It’s why certain niche businesses, like the

Limoges Box Boutique and others focused on preserving intricate, tested methods, succeed where large, clunky corporate processes fail. They resist the urge to digitize the soul out of the work.

Finn’s manual system managed the environment (is the structure stable?). Our modern enterprise systems are lighthouse sensors: they tell us if the light is on. But they give us 47 pages of compliance documentation while we ignore the fact that the entire mountain supporting the lighthouse is crumbling underneath because no one is walking the 7-point checklist anymore.

The Audit Trap

I spend probably 77% of my administrative time feeding data into systems that ultimately fail to tell me anything useful. They report on volume, on completion rates, on compliance-metrics that satisfy an auditor but entirely miss the substance of the work. If I have to spend 7 hours in training to learn a system that forces me to do 27 steps to achieve 5 steps worth of actual productivity, we have a fundamental organizational illness. We are sacrificing productivity on the altar of auditability.

Rethinking Progress

We need to stop asking, “How do we digitize this form?” and start asking, “What essential human judgment does this form capture, and can we design a digital interaction that enhances that judgment, rather than replacing it with an input requirement?”

If the answer to the second question is no, then the paper form, requiring the physical act of writing and the commitment of a real signature, is the superior technology. We were promised freedom; we got 27 steps to file a travel receipt.

The Unwitting Clerks

And that is the essential, terrifying revelation: that we built systems of control, thinking we were building systems of efficiency, and now we don’t know who is serving whom. Is the work truly being done, or are we just feeding the 27-step beast?

Maybe the true mark of technological progress won’t be speed, but the moment a new system allows us to responsibly simplify, stripping away the 27 steps and leaving only the essential five. Until then, we are just highly paid data entry clerks serving the digital bureaucracy we unwittingly created.