The Humming and the Hope

The fluorescent ballast in Conference Room B was humming, a high, thin mosquito whine that seemed specifically tuned to prevent deep contemplation. I kept rereading the same phrase on the screen-holistic cross-platform synergy-and then glancing at the clock. The mandatory three-hour training for ‘Project Fusion’ was finally hemorrhaging to its close.

That was the feeling in the room: slow, internal bleeding. Not anger, just resignation. We had just spent twenty-four months and approximately $2,000,007 implementing this platform-a system promised to fix our ‘pipeline visibility’ and ‘streamline departmental handoffs.’ It was supposed to eliminate the friction that had been grinding our culture down for years, the subtle resistance born not of malice, but of poorly defined turf and historical grievances.

The entire room nodded, almost imperceptibly. The collective thought was loud enough to drown out the buzzing light: Yes. Tell me the escape route. Tell me how I get back to the place where I have control.

The Escape Route: Excel’s Dominance

The answer, of course, was yes. And within 47 days, the $2,000,007 platform-the supposed antidote to our chaos-was primarily being used as an extremely expensive, highly complicated data input form whose sole true function was generating the proprietary export files that fed the real engine of our operation: dozens of individual, highly personalized, and completely untraceable Google Sheets.

This is where I stop being the armchair critic, because I have made this exact mistake. I spent a staggering amount on a bespoke resource planning tool that promised to ‘align our operational goals.’ What it really promised was a magical replacement for the difficult conversation about workload distribution and accountability. I knew, intellectually, that the problem was cultural: we lacked the trust to tell the truth about how long tasks actually took. But it felt cleaner to spend money on a glossy user interface than to face the brutal, human work of restructuring power.

And this is the core of techno-solutionism in the modern corporate world: the purchase of technology as an emotional buffer. We are terrified of human complexity, ambiguity, and conflict. So, we buy a system to defer the conflict indefinitely, allowing us to point at a screen and say, “The process demands it,” rather than admitting, “I, your boss, am demanding you change the way you work because we don’t trust each other.”

The Inspector: Judgment Underpinning Trust

I’ve always admired people whose work is governed by immovable, physical rules. People like Chen A.J., an elevator inspector I met downtown. Chen’s world is binary: the car either stops level or it doesn’t. The hoist cable either meets the B44 code, or it fails. There’s no subjectivity in gravity.

Chen A.J. isn’t just checking boxes; he’s underwriting trust with a steel-tipped pencil. His expertise is rooted in understanding the code, yes, but also in knowing which 47 bolts are most likely to fail based on ambient conditions-information the manual doesn’t explicitly detail. It’s judgment built on experience.

We tried to build Project Fusion to mimic Chen A.J.’s process for our deliverables. We built checklists and alerts. We wanted to eliminate judgment because judgment implies risk, and risk implies accountability. But the moment you eliminate judgment, you eliminate expertise. All Project Fusion could ever track was the completion of the checklist, not the quality of the inspection. It was an expensive monument to confirmation bias.

Outsourcing Discomfort

We bought the software to manage the collective anxiety around big decisions. We hoped that if the system told us *what* to do next, we wouldn’t have to carry the weight of *why* we were doing it. We want to outsource the discomfort of decision-making.

This is the same impulse that drives people to look for complex algorithmic advice when faced with pivotal choice. If you’re wrestling with that kind of strategic uncertainty, you might find some useful framing techniques via Ask ROB.

Think about what the Google Sheet represents. It’s not just familiarity. It’s radical transparency within a small, trusted circle. It’s flexibility. It’s an admission that the *real* process requires minute-to-minute adaptation, iteration, and above all, human-to-human collaboration that supersedes rigid, slow-moving institutional code.

The Spiritual Error

I spent two months after Fusion’s failure agonizing over what I could have done differently, searching for the technical bug. The mistake wasn’t technical. The mistake was spiritual. We tried to automate trust, and trust is the one resource that cannot be coded.

The True Efficiency Test

If you want to know the true efficiency of any new system, skip the demo, skip the training, and skip the dashboard. Go to the person who has been quietly doing the job for 17 years, and ask them those two things. The answer tells you everything you need to know about where your culture is actually living.