The Tyranny of Seventeen Clicks

The trainer, smiling a little too wide, clicked the shared screen. The pixelation on his webcam made his enthusiasm seem slightly manic, like he was selling us a miracle cure that tasted faintly of dust. This was ‘Project Fusion’ mandatory onboarding, a two-hour block nobody had asked for, designed to streamline everything we already did perfectly well through email.

He was showing us how to request three days of vacation time. He moved the cursor with maddening, deliberate slowness. File. Sub-Menu A. Personnel. Sub-Menu B. Leave Request. Data Entry Form 2.0. Then, the truly glorious part: navigating the four required fields that didn’t exist two months ago-project code tagging, liability waiver confirmation, the mandatory department head tag (for a department head you’ve never met, whose signature is now required digitally, replacing the quick approval from your direct manager).

We replaced a quick exchange of human trust with 17 clicks of organizational fear. This is the contradiction I live in, and I know I’m not alone. I see the flaw, I feel the resistance, yet I’m the same person who spent three days last month refining my personal note-taking architecture until it had four separate cross-referencing databases.

The Nature of Interference

I felt that momentary disconnect-that misinterpretation of where the connection was supposed to land-and it’s exactly the feeling this new software provides. We bought a solution, and now we’re staring at something that requires more focused effort to operate than the actual task demands.

We buy enterprise software for big money-$777 per license per user, or whatever the actual, ridiculous number is-to solve large-scale human coordination problems. The hypothesis is: if we constrain behavior through rigid input fields, we eliminate human error. But what happens is that the rigid, unforgiving constraints of the software introduce entirely new coordination problems.

I was talking recently to Hazel Z., a typeface designer. Her work is about invisible infrastructure, the silent clarity of the letterform. She mentioned how the mark of good design is when the user never has to think about the tool. If Hazel Z. looked at Project Fusion, she wouldn’t see a tool; she would see interference-a distracting visual noise meant to reassure the organization, but not assist the person doing the work.

The Cost of Perfection: A Career Lesson

It reminds me of a mistake I made early in my career. I championed the implementation of a hyper-customizable client management system, promising our executive team that it would increase sales team efficiency by 237%. It was beautiful, technically complex, and promised complete data visibility.

What I failed to account for was the required data hygiene. Cleaning and structuring 15 years of messy, ad-hoc client notes into the system’s precise 7-category taxonomy took 9 months of dedicated, specialized labor. Salespeople eventually reverted to scribbling notes on index cards because inputting data into the new system added 20 minutes to every single interaction. The solution was the barrier.

Fear Over Friction

It happens when the perceived risk of an imperfect process outweighs the measurable cost of user friction. Organizations fear the auditor more than they fear the employee burnout. The result is software that is designed to satisfy compliance checklists, not human needs. It’s an exercise in organizational self-defense, disguised as efficiency.

I find myself doing this constantly: criticizing the excessive overhead in enterprise systems while simultaneously arguing for new micro-processes in my own work because, frankly, I don’t trust the simple, human method to always be right. I always circle back to the belief that a structure can contain the mess, even though experience tells me the structure often just becomes a new kind of mess.

The Root Cause: Lack of Trust

This isn’t about being anti-technology. It’s about recognizing that the soul of organizational dysfunction isn’t the lack of a tool, but a lack of trust. The reason Project Fusion required 17 clicks to approve a vacation is not because they care about efficiency, but because they fundamentally don’t trust a manager’s quick judgment or an employee’s honesty. The software becomes the mechanized guarantor of compliance.

The real failure is believing that by complicating the input, we simplify the output. We don’t. We just make the failure more expensive to fix, and far more exhausting to endure. We should always choose the four-keystroke solution over the 17-click ritual, even if it feels marginally less ‘secure’ on paper. What are we truly automating when we adopt these systems? Not our work, but our lack of faith.