The Acrid Promise of Permanence

The smell of the Sharpie is what hits you first. It’s that acrid, chemical promise of permanence. He’s bent over a stack of printer paper, the harsh blue work-light of the backstage area carving deep shadows onto his face. With a metal ruler, he’s meticulously striking through lines of text, making notes in the margins in a cramped, all-caps script. On a sleek monitor just to his left, the show-calling software sits open, its elegant user interface displaying the exact same information. The software cost the company $47,000.

The paper and the Sharpie cost maybe 77 cents. Yet in the critical thirty minutes before the curtain rises, he trusts the paper.

For years, seeing that scene would have filled me with a quiet rage. I would have seen defiance. I would have seen a stubborn refusal to adapt. I would have seen an employee actively undermining a significant technology investment. I would have seen it as my job to fix him, to force him into the digital world we’d paid for. I saw his behavior as the problem. I was completely, utterly wrong.

Outsmarting the Smart Car

I think differently now, partly because I spent twenty-seven minutes yesterday standing in a parking lot, staring at my own car keys sitting on the driver’s seat. My car, a marvel of modern engineering, has a system specifically designed to prevent this. It knows when the key is inside. It’s not supposed to lock. But it did. In a moment of distraction, juggling a laptop bag and a call, I had outsmarted the smart car. The old way-a simple metal key in my pocket-was dumb, but it was also immune to that specific, infuriating failure. My brilliant, feature-rich car had created a new, more complex way for me to fail.

That technician with his Sharpie wasn’t being defiant. He was being rational. He was engaged in an act of profound, pragmatic self-preservation. A piece of paper cannot crash. Its battery cannot die. It doesn’t require a software update mid-show, and its user interface is whatever he decides to draw on it. He’s not resisting change; he’s resisting a system that introduces more risk than it removes. He’s choosing the tool that makes him better at his job, not the tool that management thinks should make him better.

These workarounds, these ‘shadow systems,’ are everywhere once you start looking. The shared Excel spreadsheet that runs in parallel to the multi-million dollar CRM. The wall of sticky notes that duplicates the functionality of the project management suite. The group chat where the real decisions are made, while the official channels remain a ghost town of formal announcements. For years, the standard management playbook has been to hunt down and extinguish these systems. It’s a costly, morale-destroying game of whack-a-mole. And it completely misses the point.

It’s a map of the friction in your official processes. It’s a live-action report on the failures of your top-down technology strategy. Every unofficial spreadsheet is a feature request in disguise. Every handwritten checklist is a critique of your software’s user experience. These aren’t acts of rebellion; they are cries for help. They are functional, user-generated solutions to real-world problems your official systems have failed to solve.

Sofia J.-C. and the Desire Paths

I was talking with a woman named Sofia J.-C. the other day, a traffic pattern analyst for a large municipality. Her job isn’t to just look at the roads. Her real work is studying the “desire paths”-the muddy tracks worn into grass between official, paved sidewalks. Cities spend fortunes on pristine concrete walkways, but the desire paths show where people actually want to go. Sofia told me her most important insights don’t come from traffic cameras, but from walking through a park after a rainstorm and seeing where the mud is.

She once presented a report showing that one particularly prominent desire path saved commuters an average of just 17 seconds, yet was used by 87% of pedestrians. The perceived efficiency far outweighed the minimal actual gain.

That’s what your shadow systems are. They are your organization’s desire paths. They show you where the official sidewalks are poorly placed. I once mandated the use of a sophisticated project management tool for a team of 37 engineers. It was beautiful. It had automated reporting, resource allocation models, Gantt charts that would bring a tear to your eye. A month later, the project was still on track, but the software dashboard was a sea of outdated information. I found the lead engineer, not at his desk, but in front of a massive whiteboard covered in a chaotic, beautiful constellation of sticky notes. He had, with a few packs of 3x5s and a marker, recreated a Kanban board that was more intuitive, faster to update, and more useful to his team than the tool I’d spent 177 hours getting approved.

The Whiteboard: Doing vs. Reporting

My system took seven clicks and three screen-loads to move a task from ‘In Progress’ to ‘Done.’ His took one physical motion. I had built a system for reporting to me. He had built a system for doing the work. My mistake was punishing him for it. I should have been taking pictures of that whiteboard and sending them to the software developers as our next set of feature requests. That whiteboard wasn’t a problem to be solved; it was the solution, presenting itself in plain sight.

In high-stakes environments, reliability will always trump features. The live events industry is a brutal, unforgiving proving ground for this principle. When you have a keynote speaker in front of 2,777 people and a client who has invested six figures in a single day, a software glitch isn’t an annoyance; it’s a catastrophe. That’s why the best technicians and producers build their workflows around proven, robust systems. They understand that the true value lies not in the flashiest new tech, but in the certainty of execution. It’s a philosophy that extends to the partners they choose, favoring those who provide solid, dependable AV services and rentals over those who promise bleeding-edge features with questionable stability. The technician’s Sharpie is the physical embodiment of that ethos: it works. Every single time.

Hunting for Truth: The Diagnostic Power of Shadow Systems

So I’ve stopped trying to stamp out the shadow systems. I now hunt for them like a detective. I see them as the most honest feedback I will ever get. I ask the teams who use them to walk me through their process. Why this spreadsheet? What does it do that the CRM can’t? What single field here is the most important? Why this format? The answers are never about defiance. They are about speed, clarity, simplicity, and control.

They’re about a user interface that doesn’t get in the way. They’re about reducing the number of clicks. They’re about seeing all the relevant information on a single screen without having to open three different tabs. They are about building a tool perfectly suited for the job, by the people who actually do the job.

It’s a humbling process. It requires admitting that the expensive, top-down solution you championed might be, in practice, a failure. It’s like admitting my smart car is, in some ways, dumber than a 1987 pickup truck. But that admission is the first step. You can’t fix a problem you refuse to see. And the problem isn’t your team’s stubbornness. It’s the gap between the work as you imagine it, and the work as it is actually, messily, and resourcefully done.