Every enterprise runs on an invisible operating layer: the spreadsheets, side chats, custom queries, and personal heroics employees built to make broken workflows feel continuous. That's the Workaround Economy™.
It never shows up in capacity models. It rarely shows up in governance reviews. It absolutely shows up the moment someone tries to scale a workflow with automation or AI — at which point the workarounds break and the underlying fragmentation becomes visible.
Diagnose the Workaround Economy before you scale automation through it. Make the manual layer visible, attribute its cost, and either eliminate the workflow gap or design the AI around it deliberately. Skipping that step is how AI pilots become AI postmortems.