The pan hits the flame with a whoosh, a dragon’s breath of orange licking its seasoned-black base. Chef Antoine moves like a dancer who has shed all self-consciousness, a blur of scarred knuckles and focused eyes. He pivots on his left foot, grabs parsley with his right hand, and slides a finished plate onto the pass without looking. It’s a 14-year-old muscle-memory ballet. A new trainee, Leo, hustles past with a stockpot and his foot slides, just a fraction, on a worn tile. He catches himself, sloshing broth on the floor. Antoine doesn’t turn. “Tile in front of the fryer is loose. You get used to it.”
And there it is. The most dangerous phrase in any organization.
You get used to it.
Proximity Equals Adaptation: The Hidden Cost of Expertise
We are wired to believe that the person closest to the work knows it best. We ask them, beg them, for suggestions. We put up a whiteboard, hand out sticky notes, and ask for ideas on how to improve the process. We get shrugs. We get silence. We get suggestions for better coffee in the breakroom. We get frustrated. Why won’t they help us fix the things that make their own lives harder? The assumption is that proximity equals clarity. The reality is that proximity equals adaptation. Humans are the undisputed world champions of adaptation. We will build an entire cathedral of complex, ingenious workarounds on top of a cracked foundation, and after a while, we forget the foundation is even cracked. The workaround becomes the work.
Antoine doesn’t see a broken floor. He sees a map of his domain, a landscape he has mastered. The loose tile isn’t a bug; it’s a feature of his personal OS. His brain has already calculated the micro-adjustment in his step, the slight shift of weight needed to avoid it. It costs him zero conscious thought. In fact, it’s part of his expertise. A new chef in his kitchen would be clumsy, slow. Antoine’s mastery isn’t just in his cooking; it’s in his navigation of a fundamentally flawed environment. Fixing the floor wouldn’t just be an improvement; it would be a disruption to his flow. It would, in a strange way, invalidate a tiny piece of his hard-won skill.
Systemic Anesthesia: When Pain Becomes Normal
This is a phenomenon known as functional fixedness, a cognitive bias that limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used. But it’s deeper than that. It’s a kind of systemic anesthesia. The initial, sharp pain of a problem-a clunky piece of software, a nonsensical reporting structure, a treacherous floor-dulls over time. We learn to accommodate the pain. I felt this just click the next website page the other day, pulling a splinter from my thumb. I’d had it for a week, a tiny sliver of wood from a moving box. For the first day, it was all I could think about. By day three, I was unconsciously holding my phone differently, typing with a slightly altered posture. I had adapted. My body built a workaround. When I finally sat down and meticulously removed it, the feeling of relief was absurdly, disproportionately huge. I hadn’t realized how much energy my brain was spending on the background task of not touching the splinter. The chronic, low-grade irritation was gone, and the freedom was immense. Your organization is filled with splinters that your team has learned to live with.
I saw the perfect example of this with a man named Paul G., a brilliant advisor I worked with at a refugee resettlement agency. Paul was the wizard. His job was to navigate the labyrinthine bureaucracy of getting families approved for housing, social services, and work permits. The official process was a known disaster, with a 44% rejection rate on first submission due to missing or incorrectly formatted information. Yet Paul’s success rate was nearly perfect. His secret was a process so arcane, so utterly personalized, it was a work of art. It involved 24 distinct steps, four different colors of highlighter, and a requirement that forms be submitted on Tuesdays before 11 AM. He even knew which government clerk responded best to a fax versus an email.
Paul G.’s Labyrinth: When the Solution Becomes the Problem
When his director asked the team for improvement suggestions, Paul was the first to complain about how inefficient everyone else was. “They don’t have the discipline to follow the steps,” he’d say. I made the mistake of defending him once. I argued that we should just try to document and scale Paul’s method. I thought the genius was in the workaround. It took a consultant pointing out the obvious for me to see it: Paul was the problem. Or rather, his beautiful, intricate, heroic solution was masking a catastrophic system failure. He had adapted so perfectly to the broken system that he couldn’t see it anymore. He just saw his own success. The day he got sick and a family’s application was delayed by 14 days, the cost became clear. His workaround wasn’t scalable. It wasn’t even transferable. It was a dead end.
It took a consultant pointing out the obvious for me to see it:
Paul WAS the problem.
Fixing the foundation is always more expensive than learning to walk around the cracks.
The Leader’s Paradox: Paving the Road, Not Just Changing the Shoes
This is the leader’s paradox. Your most valuable, experienced people may be the ones least capable of identifying your biggest opportunities for improvement. They are the masters of the existing, broken reality. Their advice, born from years of navigating the mess, will almost always be about creating better workarounds. They’ll suggest a new checklist, a better spreadsheet, a weekly meeting to triage the failures of the last weekly meeting. They are trying to sell you a more comfortable shoe for a journey over rocky terrain, when what you really need is a paved road. The trainee, Leo, who slipped on the tile? He’s the one who sees the problem clearly. He hasn’t had time to adapt. His senses are not yet dulled. To him, it’s not a feature of the landscape; it’s a shocking, dangerous flaw. This is why a proper fix, a seamless and stable surface like high-quality epoxy kitchen flooring, isn’t just click the next website page a repair. It’s a statement that we will no longer normalize deficiencies. It eliminates the entire category of problem that required the workaround in the first place.
Rocky path with a “comfortable shoe.”
Smooth, stable road to progress.
We love to celebrate grit and resilience. We praise people who can get the job done no matter the obstacle. And we should. But we often fail to distinguish between productive grit-pushing through a genuinely difficult task-and adaptive grit-finding clever ways to cope with a stupid, broken process. For years, I believed that celebrating the latter was a sign of a strong culture. I now believe it’s a sign of lazy leadership. It’s allowing your best people to spend their brilliance on accommodating mediocrity instead of building excellence. The cost is enormous. Every minute Antoine’s brain spends subconsciously calculating his path across a broken floor is a minute not spent creating a new dish. Every ounce of Paul’s genius poured into his 24-step workaround is an ounce of genius not spent on counseling a traumatized family.
Overcoming Resistance: Designing a World Without Labyrinths
The challenge is that when you propose fixing the foundation, you will get resistance. And it will come from your best people. It will sound like wisdom.
“We don’t have time for that right now.”
“The current system works fine if you just know how to use it.”
“This is just the cost of doing business.”
What they are really saying is, “You are trying to change the rules of a game I have already mastered.” They are protecting their expertise. Your job as a leader is to show them that their real value isn’t in their ability to navigate the labyrinth. It’s in their ability to help you design a world where the labyrinth no longer exists.