I recently joined Tim Staton on his podcast, Tim Stating the Obvious, to talk about An Inbox Between Us. We covered a lot of ground, but we kept coming back to one thing.
Spreadsheets.
Not because they are interesting on their own. They are interesting because of what they tell us.
Walk through almost any organization and you will find spreadsheets that were never part of the original design. Nobody planned for them. They showed up because people still needed to get work done. Information had to be combined. Reports had to be created. Decisions had to be made before the official system was capable of supporting them.
That is why I have started looking at spreadsheets differently. They are less of a technology problem and more of a behavioral one. Every extra workbook usually points to a place where people quietly adapted the business so work could keep moving.
At one point I joked that if AI really wanted to change the world, it should eliminate the spreadsheet.
I was not entirely joking.
The conversation eventually turned to AI projects themselves. There is often an assumption that if the technology is good enough, the organization will naturally adapt around it. My experience has usually been the opposite. People already have ways of getting work done, even if those ways never appear anywhere officially. Ignore that reality and the new solution does not replace the workaround. It simply joins it.
That is one of the ideas behind An Inbox Between Us. Long before AI arrived, organizations had already built a second operating system. It lives in inboxes, spreadsheets, side conversations, favors, judgment calls, and the people everyone knows to ask when the documented process stops making sense.
Those things are not failures.
They are clues.
They tell you where work actually happens.
I am grateful to Tim Staton for the conversation because it stayed focused on the everyday reality of work instead of treating AI as another technology discussion.
Following up on Tim’s comment in the post:
If someone counted every spreadsheet across your organization tomorrow, would they be measuring technical debt…
…or would they be measuring everything your documented processes still do not explain?