Brenda is clicking. It is the only sound in the conference room, a rhythmic, plastic snapping that feels like a countdown to a collective migraine. She is currently on the 24th screen of the new ‘streamlined’ expense reporting system, trying to upload a receipt for a $4 ham sandwich. The cursor spins-a little blue circle of death-while 14 of us watch our lives evaporate in real-time. Someone in the back, probably Pete from logistics, whispers the question that has been haunting the hallways for weeks: ‘Can we just go back to the old PDF?’

I’m watching this and I can’t help but think about my Honda. Specifically, I’m thinking about my keys, which are currently sitting on the driver’s seat while I stand on the outside of the glass, looking in. It’s a special kind of helplessness, isn’t it? To see exactly what you need, to have the tool right there in plain sight, but to be barred from it by a barrier you created yourself. I locked those keys in because I was trying to be too efficient, trying to grab 4 bags of groceries in one trip while hitting the lock button with my elbow. In my rush to optimize the walk to my front door, I rendered the entire vehicle useless. That is exactly what we have done with our technology. We have optimized ourselves into a state of total paralysis.

The Nuance vs. The Dropdown

Take Quinn J.-M., for instance. Quinn is a fragrance evaluator, a person whose nose is more calibrated than most laboratory sensors. Her job is to sit in a room with 104 tiny glass vials and determine if the ‘heart’ of a new perfume is leaning too heavily into the synthetic musks. It is a job of intuition, of 14 subtle nuances that can’t always be named. But the new enterprise resource planning software doesn’t care about nuances. It wants Quinn to categorize her olfactory findings into 44 pre-defined dropdown menus.

Quinn told me over coffee-which took her 44 minutes to expense, by the way-that she now spends 64 percent of her day fighting the interface rather than smelling the scents. The software was bought by people who have never smelled a raw damask rose in their lives. They bought it because the dashboard looked clean in the 14-slide PowerPoint presentation delivered by 4 consultants in expensive suits. Those consultants promised a ‘single source of truth.’ What they delivered was a digital straightjacket.

[The map is not the territory, but we’ve started burning the territory to make it fit the map.]

– Observation on Digital Over-engineering

Amplification, Not Filtration

We buy technology to solve human problems, but we forget that technology is an amplifier, not a filter. If your company culture is a chaotic mess of overlapping jurisdictions and 34 different ‘urgent’ priorities, a $2,000,004 software implementation will only make that chaos move at the speed of light. It doesn’t fix the dysfunction; it just digitizes it, making it harder to ignore and even harder to escape. We’ve replaced the human ‘I’ll just walk over and ask Brenda’ with a ticket system that requires 144 fields to be filled out before a human even sees it.

They assume that if you add 4 more steps to a process, but do it on a screen with a pretty UI, it’s somehow better than 4 signatures on a piece of paper. But paper is flexible. Paper doesn’t have a ‘mandatory field’ that prevents you from moving forward because you don’t know the mid-tier sub-project code for a box of paperclips.

Even a simple consumer experience like ordering an Auspost Vape has a more intuitive, human-centric flow than the internal procurement systems used by Fortune 500 companies. Why? Because in the consumer world, if you make the process 14 steps too long, the customer leaves. In the corporate world, the ‘customer’ is the employee, and they have nowhere else to go.