How Organizations Build Inefficiency by Protecting Against What Rarely Happens
By Larry Ramirez
Introduction – “Yeah, But What About…”
Every leader who studies processes long enough encounters the same moment.
A workflow is mapped. Waste becomes visible. Hand-offs look heavier than they need to be. Delays appear where none seem justified. An opportunity for improvement emerges—clear, logical, and grounded in experience. The path forward feels obvious.
And then someone says it.
“Yeah, but what about…”
What follows is usually a story. A rare situation. An edge case. A time when something unusual happened and the process had to bend to survive. The explanation sounds reasonable. It always does, because it is rooted in something that actually occurred.
So the leader asks a simple question, not to challenge the person, but to understand the scale of the concern.
“Out of a hundred times, how often does that actually happen?”
The answer is almost always the same.
“Well… hardly ever. But it happens.”
And just like that, inefficiency is defended—not because it is common, but because it is possible. A process that should serve the everyday reality of work is redirected to accommodate a memory.
How Processes Become Hostage to the Outlier
Most processes do not start inefficient. They become that way gradually, through well-intentioned decisions layered over time.
One adjustment is made to accommodate a rare scenario. Another is added to prevent a one-time failure from recurring. A workaround becomes permanent. A safeguard becomes standard. Each addition feels prudent in isolation. Together, they fundamentally alter the design.
Before long, the core flow of the process is no longer designed for the typical case—it is designed for the exception. The everyday path is slowed, complicated, and burdened by controls meant to protect against events that almost never occur.
The organization begins spending time, money, and cognitive energy solving for what rarely happens, while quietly penalizing what happens every day. What began as responsible risk management slowly becomes structural drag.
The Illusion of Wisdom
Seasoned team members are often the strongest defenders of exception-driven designs. Not because they are opposed to improvement, but because they have lived through the moments when things went wrong.
They remember the failure vividly. The stress. The scramble. The pressure to recover under scrutiny. The emotional imprint of that experience lingers far longer than the thousands of times the exception never occurred.
Psychologically, rare but painful events carry disproportionate weight. Humans are wired to remember threats more intensely than stability. The mind elevates the outlier because it feels dangerous—even when it is statistically insignificant.
So when improvement is proposed, the response is rarely analytical. It is protective.
“This exists for a reason.”
And in a narrow sense, that is true. But it is not the whole truth. Experience can inform design—or it can freeze it.
When Protection Replaces Design
Over time, organizations stop designing processes for flow and start designing them for fear.
Fear of the one order that doesn’t fit the pattern.
Fear of the one customer who escalates.
Fear of the one scenario that embarrassed the team years ago.
Instead of asking why the exception exists, the organization reorganizes itself around it. Layers are added not to improve outcomes, but to prevent discomfort. Controls multiply, not because they add value, but because removing them feels risky.
The rare case becomes institutionalized.
The exception becomes embedded.
The process slows—not because it must, but because no one wants to be the person who removes the safety net.
This is how organizations end up with processes that are robust against unlikely events but inefficient every single day.
The Cost Nobody Sees
The cost of designing for outliers rarely appears on a financial statement in obvious ways.
It shows up as longer cycle times that quietly become accepted. As unnecessary approvals that consume leadership attention. As over-processing justified as “due diligence.” As hand-offs that exist “just in case.”
People spend hours managing conditions that may never arise, while the common path—the one that actually creates value—carries the burden. Frustration grows, but it is diffuse and hard to trace back to any single decision.
The organization convinces itself that this is the price of maturity.
In reality, it is the price of avoidance.
Why Root Causes Go Unaddressed
The most troubling aspect of exception-driven design is not inefficiency—it is stagnation.
When a process is built to accommodate the outlier, there is little incentive to eliminate it. The system adapts around the problem instead of confronting it. Root cause analysis feels unnecessary because the damage has already been contained.
The organization does not ask why the rare case exists or how it could be eradicated. It simply ensures that when it happens again, the response will be familiar.
This is how problems survive indefinitely—protected by the very processes meant to manage them. The exception remains rare, but it remains alive, shaping design decisions far beyond its actual impact.
Leadership and the Comfort of “Just in Case”
Leaders often tolerate this dynamic because it feels responsible.
Removing steps feels risky. Simplifying feels exposed. Designing for the majority can feel like ignoring the minority. There is comfort in knowing the system can handle almost anything—even if it does so inefficiently.
But leadership is not about protecting against every conceivable scenario. It is about making intentional trade-offs. It is about deciding what the organization will optimize for—and what it will consciously manage outside the core flow.
A process designed for everything is a process optimized for nothing.
The Better Question Leaders Can Ask
The most effective leaders do not argue with the exception. They contextualize it.
They ask how often it occurs.
They ask why it exists.
They ask what would happen if it were addressed directly instead of indirectly.
They recognize that designing for the one percent while penalizing the ninety-nine is not prudence—it is misalignment. Improvement does not mean ignoring edge cases. It means refusing to let them dominate the design.
When leaders shift the conversation this way, teams begin to separate memory from data and fear from reality.
From Fear-Based Design to Intentional Design
Organizations mature when they shift from accommodating problems to eliminating them.
This requires courage—the courage to remove steps that feel protective, to trust patterns over anecdotes, and to accept that no process can be perfectly insulated from every anomaly. It also requires humility: acknowledging that the reason a process exists may no longer be valid, even if it once was.
When leaders model this thinking, teams begin to see design as something that evolves, not something that must be defended. History becomes a source of insight, not a constraint.
Conclusion – Choosing What to Optimize For
Every process reflects a choice about what the organization values.
When processes are built around rare events, the organization is saying that fear matters more than flow. When processes are designed around what happens most often, the organization is saying that efficiency, learning, and improvement matter more than comfort.
The question is not whether exceptions exist. They always will.
The real question is whether the organization will allow the exception to define the system—or whether it will design for reality and deal with anomalies at their source.
Leadership begins when we stop asking how to accommodate what rarely happens and start asking why it happens at all.
That is where improvement actually starts.