Tacit workflows keep organisations moving. Until they become a risk.
Tacit workflows are not automatically a bad sign. Quite often, they are evidence that experienced people have found practical ways to make imperfect systems work. They know who to speak to, which shortcut is safe, where the real bottleneck sits, and how to keep things moving when the formal process is too slow, too rigid, or too detached from reality.
That is often competence, not non-compliance.
When competence turns into invisible infrastructure
The problem starts when those informal fixes stop being occasional workarounds and become part of the operating model without anyone properly acknowledging it.
What works for a few experienced people can become fragile surprisingly quickly. Knowledge sits in people’s heads. New starters struggle to pick it up. Training becomes uneven. Certain individuals become bottlenecks. Teams start saying things like, “Jane usually sorts that,” without really noticing that part of the workflow now depends on Jane continuing to exist in roughly the same role forever.
That is not just a resilience problem. It is an operating model problem.
Why this matters more in regulated environments
In regulated settings, the stakes are higher.
If part of the real workflow sits outside the formal system, governance can be weaker than it appears. An issue resolved informally may feel efficient in the moment, but it can also bypass audit trails, blur accountability, and make it harder to show whether the right controls were followed. The fact that something works is not quite the same as being able to defend how it works.
Informal resolution is not necessarily wrong. The risk is when it becomes normal without becoming visible.
Why change efforts often miss the real workflow
This also makes improvement harder than it looks.
When organisations try to redesign services, introduce new systems, or apply AI to operational processes, they usually begin with the official workflow. The difficulty is that the official workflow is often only partly true. The real version includes the shortcuts, exceptions, local fixes, and unwritten judgement that staff use every day to make the thing function.
Ignore that tacit layer, and there is a good chance the project starts solving the wrong problem.
That is one reason so many change efforts disappoint. The process looked clear enough on paper. The reality underneath it was not.
What this means for AI and workflow redesign
For organisations thinking seriously about AI, automation, or workflow redesign, this matters more than it first appears.
Before work can become more machine-assistable, you need a reasonably honest picture of how it actually happens now, including the parts nobody wrote down. Otherwise, you are not really modernising the workflow. You are building on top of invisible dependency and hoping it behaves like structure.
The official process is the map. The tacit workflow is the path people actually use.
If you only look at the map, you do not understand the terrain.