Official, Real, Ideal
Balancing current reality with enabling future change
Work systems must balance reflecting current reality with enabling future change. Codify too much of today and you lock in the status quo. Omit too much and you create confusion or resistance.
There is always tension between the official way work is supposed to happen, the real way it happens, and the ideal future state. Capturing current reality can be useful, but it can also expose outdated processes, misaligned incentives, or habits that should not be preserved. Some tension between these versions of reality is healthy.
If you instrument everything that exists today, you risk fossilizing it. Work systems are not just mirrors. They are also levers for change, and change often comes through selective omission rather than total documentation. The practical challenge is deciding what deserves to be represented, what should be phased out, and how systems can evolve without becoming permanent monuments to yesterday's way of working.
| The Promise of AI | The Potential Trap |
|---|---|
| AI can help teams navigate the gap between current and desired state by spotting patterns, flagging decaying processes, and suggesting what to keep, adapt, or sunset. | If AI overfits to current behavior, it can reinforce the status quo under the guise of objectivity. The system becomes very accurate about how things work today, but less helpful in creating space for better ways of working. |