The blue glow of the projector is doing something aggressive to the back of my skull. Gary-the trainer whose tie is exactly 2 centimeters too short-is hovering his mouse over a button labeled ‘Initiate Synergistic Touchpoint.’ He is currently on screen 12 of a process that used to take exactly 2 seconds on a scrap of paper. He calls this ‘Digital Transformation.’ I call it a slow-motion collision with a wall that isn’t there. I know a thing or two about walls that aren’t there; I walked into a glass door this morning. My nose is still throbbing with the physical evidence that ‘invisible’ and ‘seamless’ are often just marketing terms for ‘dangerous’ and ‘poorly marked.’

In the back row, River M. is leaning back, his chair balanced precariously on 2 legs. As a debate coach, River has spent 22 years deconstructing bad arguments, and the software we are currently being forced to adopt is the greatest logical fallacy he has ever encountered. It is a $2,000,002 argument from authority. The authority, in this case, is a group of consultants from a firm that likely has 52 floors of people who have never actually filled out a shipping manifest or handled a customer complaint in their lives.

Gary clicks. The screen flickers. A loading wheel spins for 12 seconds. Gary smiles a strained, practiced smile. ‘This allows for unprecedented data granularity,’ he says. River M. doesn’t even look up from his own laptop. He’s already opened the old spreadsheet-the one we all agreed, in a whispered meeting at the coffee machine 2 days ago, to keep using in secret. That spreadsheet is a masterpiece of 22 columns and zero bullshit. It doesn’t require a login. It doesn’t require ‘multifactor authentication’ that sends a code to a phone that is currently out of battery. It just works.

The Seduction of Superficial Progress

We are currently trapped in a cycle where complexity is mistaken for progress. It is a seductive trap for the C-suite. When an executive looks at a simple process, they see something that they cannot justify to the board. A simple process looks cheap. A simple process looks like something anyone could do. But a $2,000,002 software suite? That looks like vision. That looks like a ‘modernization strategy.’

It doesn’t matter that the actual workers now need 12 clicks to do what used to take 2. It doesn’t matter that the cognitive load of navigating SynergyFlow 3.0 is so high that our actual output has dropped by 32 percent since the pilot program began. The appearance of modernization has been achieved, and in the world of high-level management, appearances are often the only metrics that survive the trip up the ladder.

The Honesty of Physical Solutions

I look at the glass door incident again in my mind. The architect who designed that lobby probably felt very proud of the ‘uninterrupted flow’ of the space. They wanted to erase the boundary between the inside and the outside. But boundaries exist for a reason. Humans need to know where the air ends and the solid matter begins. When you erase the markers of reality, people get hurt. Software ‘solutions’ do the same thing. They attempt to erase the ‘friction’ of human interaction by burying it under layers of automated menus and ‘intelligent’ routing. But that friction is where the work actually happens. Friction is how you know you’re making contact with a problem.

“If I have to navigate 12 sub-menus to log a single interaction, and each of those menus has a 2-second delay, I am spending 24 seconds of dead time per entry. Across 52 employees, that is roughly 22 hours of lost productivity per day. Can you explain the synergistic benefit of losing 22 hours of labor to a loading screen?”

Gary blinks. He wasn’t prepared for the math. Gary was prepared for ‘buy-in.’ He was prepared for ‘culture shifting.’ He looks at his notes, which I suspect are just a list of buzzwords arranged in a 32-point font. ‘The benefit,’ Gary says, ‘is the data. We can now see exactly when the interaction occurred.’

‘We knew that before,’ River M. counters. ‘The spreadsheet has a timestamp. It’s in column 2.’

This obsession with the intangible is a disease. It’s a way for people who don’t do the work to feel like they are managing the work. If they can see a graph of our ‘Synergy Levels’ in real-time, they suspect they are in control. But control is an illusion when the people on the ground are mutinying in the name of a CSV file.

I think about the physical world. I think about things that have weight. When you have a noise problem in an office, you don’t buy a software package that simulates a quiet room. You don’t ‘digitally transform’ the air. You buy something that absorbs the sound. You look for a solution that exists in three dimensions, something like Slat Solution that actually changes the environment you are standing in. There is a profound honesty in physical solutions. They don’t have 12-page end-user license agreements. They don’t require an IT department to ‘provision’ them. They just sit there and perform the function they were designed for.

We have lost our respect for the ‘just sitting there.’ We have been convinced that if a solution isn’t dynamic, cloud-based, and powered by some vaguely defined artificial intelligence, it isn’t a solution at all. But my nose, which is currently a vibrant shade of purple, would disagree. The glass door was very dynamic in the way it reflected the light, but it was a failure of a door. A good door is a heavy piece of wood with a handle. You know what it is. You know what it does. It doesn’t need to ‘sync’ with your calendar to let you into the room.

The Breakroom Rebellion

After the training, I find River M. in the breakroom. He is staring at a vending machine that has a touchscreen interface. It’s a new model. To get a bag of pretzels, you have to select a category, then a sub-category, then swipe your card, then confirm that you don’t want to sign up for the ‘Pretzel Perks’ newsletter.

‘It’s happening everywhere,’ he says, nodding toward the machine. ‘They’ve turned a simple transaction into a debate where I’m not allowed to talk.’

We are currently living through a period where the tools we use are becoming our masters. We spend more time maintaining the tools than we do using them to create value. I suspect that in 12 years, we will look back on this era of ‘software-first’ thinking as a collective fever dream. We will realize that you cannot solve human problems with 12 clicks and a $2,000,002 subscription fee. You solve human problems by making the world easier to navigate, not harder.

I open the spreadsheet instead. There is a certain joy in the

rebellion of the simple. When the world demands that you engage with its 52 layers of unnecessary complexity, there is power in choosing the

2-step process. There is power in the spreadsheet. There is power in the physical wall.

I type a single row into River’s secret file. Name: Customer 102. Date: Today. Status: Handled. It took me 2 seconds. In the corner of my eye, I see the SynergyFlow tab still spinning its little wheel, trying to load the ‘Sentiment Analysis’ module. It can keep spinning. I have actual work to do, and I don’t need a $2,000,002 ghost to tell me how to do it. The physical world is calling, and it doesn’t require a password change every 32 days. I’m going to go buy some wall panels, fix the echo in my office, and stop pretending that the cloud has the answers to questions I never asked.

The next time someone offers you a $2,000,002 software solution, ask them how many clicks it takes to say ‘no.’ If the answer is more than 2, you already know it’s a lie.