The Friction We Forgot
owl writes:
https://bravenewteams.substack.com/p/the-friction-we-forgot
The sales pitch for automating routine work has a pleasing moral clarity. Machines will take the drudgery, humans will do the meaningful bits, and everyone will go home earlier. Few executives wish to defend bureaucracy. Fewer still want to explain why the weekly report exists at all. "Agentic" systems, now able to draft, schedule, reconcile and summarise, promise to do away with the tedious.
The promise rests on a quiet assumption - that routine work is a clean substrate. A set of repeatable steps, stable enough to be lifted from humans and installed in software, like moving from paper invoices to an ERP system. Yet in most organisations "routine" is not the same as "well-defined". It is simply familiar.
Look closely at what passes for routine and one sees something else entirely - a museum of exceptions. The spreadsheet is not tedious because it is trivial; it is tedious because it is doing the job of a broken system. The weekly deck is not a reporting tool; it is an insurance policy against internal misalignment. The procurement workflow is less a sequence of rational gates than a compromise between risk-aversion, politics and habit.
Humans have been hiding this from themselves for decades. They do so by being quietly competent.
In most firms the appearance of smoothness is purchased by people - often the most junior ones - who supply what the process does not. The analyst notices that "active user" changed definition three months ago and silently adjusts the calculation. The paralegal spots a clause that is technically compliant but commercially disastrous and flags it in plain English. The assistant knows that "final" does not mean final and schedules slack into a timeline nobody admits contains slack. The account manager has learned which customer complaint to treat as a siren and which as background noise.
These are not rare flourishes of craftsmanship. They are the operating system.
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