What would stop working if people stopped quietly fixing things?
Invisible employee compensation can make weak processes appear healthy and must be understood before AI or automation removes it.
There is a question I increasingly like asking organisations: What would stop working if people stopped quietly fixing things? Think about a monthly management report. It arrives on time. The figures are accurate. Management uses it. There is little reason to think the reporting process needs attention. Now watch somebody produce it. Information is exported from one system. Another spreadsheet arrives by email. Customer names do not match, so they are corrected. Duplicate records are removed. Several transactions require a conversation with Finance. A broken formula is repaired. Totals are checked.
Finally, the report is produced. Management sees: Report required → report delivered. The employee experiences: Export → reconcile → correct → investigate → repair → check → report. Both descriptions are true. Only one tells us what the organisation actually relies upon. I describe this effect as distortion. Successful compensation by employees can cause management to overestimate the effectiveness of the underlying process. The organisation gets the right result, so the process appears healthy. But the result may depend upon a substantial amount of largely invisible human activity. That activity is not necessarily waste.
Some of it may be legitimate judgement or useful adaptation. The important thing is to understand why it exists. Why are customer names inconsistent? Why do transactions require investigation? Why does somebody have to repair the spreadsheet? Which checks genuinely protect the organisation and which compensate for avoidable problems? Only then can we decide what should change. This becomes particularly important with AI. If we automate the visible process while ignoring the invisible compensation around it, the work does not simply disappear. We may push it elsewhere. Or worse, we may remove the human activity that was quietly preventing the process from failing.
So look beneath successful outcomes. The fact that work gets done does not necessarily tell you that the system works well. Sometimes it tells you that your people have become exceptionally good at making it work.