Amazon’s Leadership Principle “Invent and Simplify” sounds wonderfully sensible until you look at how many businesses are being held together by temporary fixes that have quietly become permanent staff members.
Not official staff members, of course. They do not have job titles, email signatures or access cards. They live in the shadows. In the extra spreadsheet. In the saved message nobody questions anymore. In the person who knows which orders need special handling because the actual process never learned how to cope.
That is the thing about workarounds. They often begin as proof that people care.
A customer needs help. A supplier is late. A system does not capture the right detail. A courier process has a gap big enough to host a weekend market. Someone clever finds a way through. They make a plan, rescue the order, calm the customer and keep the day moving.
In South Africa, we respect that energy. We have built entire survival muscles around “maak ’n plan.” When something breaks, we do not always wait for a perfect process, a neat policy or someone from Head Office to arrive with a laminated miracle. We adapt. We phone. We WhatsApp. We find the courier, the backup supplier and the one person who knows what is really going on.
That agility is powerful. It is also dangerous when nobody circles back. Because a workaround should be a bridge. It should not become the road.
A workaround should be a bridge. When nobody comes back to inspect it, the bridge becomes the road and the business starts building around the gap.
This is where Invent and Simplify becomes practical. It does not ask businesses to stop being resourceful. It asks them to notice when resourcefulness is being used to carry a broken process for too long. The invention is not always a new product, platform or system. Sometimes the invention is a better way to stop needing the same rescue every Tuesday.
For South African sellers, vendors, makers, importers and entrepreneurs, this matters because many small businesses grow through improvisation. The first few workarounds feel harmless. One customer gets a manual delivery update. One payment gets checked outside the normal rhythm. One out-of-stock item is handled by phoning the supplier directly. None of that is a scandal. It is how growing businesses breathe.
The problem begins when the same exception returns wearing different shoes. Now the seller is not running a process. They are managing a collection of remembered exceptions.
Containment is not the finish line
This is where Lean Six Sigma gives us a useful distinction: containment versus corrective action. In plain language, containment is what you do to stop the immediate bleeding. Corrective action is what you do so the wound does not reopen every week like it has a calendar invite.
Containment matters. If a customer is waiting, you may need to intervene now. If an order is wrong, you may need to fix it now. If delivery has gone sideways, you may need to apologise, update and recover the situation now. That is not failure. That is responsibility.
But containment is not the finish line. It is the fire blanket, not the building code. And a fire blanket should not be left hanging over the building forever.
Good containment needs a deadline. Not a vague “we will monitor it” deadline, which often means the workaround has just been given a camping chair and permission to stay. A real deadline. A line in the sand that says: we will contain this issue until this date, and no further without a proper decision.
That deadline should be linked to the time needed to understand the root cause and create a permanent fix. If there is a process owner, this is where ownership becomes visible. They need to prioritise the issue, investigate why the workaround is needed, and decide what will change so the same rescue is not required again.
That is where the business shows it is serious. Containment protects the customer today. Corrective action protects the next customer, the team and the standard the business is trying to build.
Turn the workaround into evidence
When a workaround solves only the immediate issue, the business still needs to ask the harder question: why did we need the workaround in the first place?
That question is where the work becomes valuable. If the answer is “because the listing was unclear,” the invention may be a better product description. If the answer is “because payment confirmation depends on one person,” the invention may be a shared check routine. If the answer is “because customers do not know delivery timing,” the invention may be a clearer update rhythm.
Notice what happens there. The workaround does not disappear into folklore. It becomes evidence. That is the shift.
A weak business hides workarounds because they look messy. A stronger business studies them because they show where the process is not strong enough yet.
A workaround is not a business model. It is a clue.
That is especially important in local businesses where human memory often does heroic things. Someone knows which courier route is tricky. Someone remembers that a particular product always needs extra packaging. Someone knows that one supplier says “tomorrow” with the confidence of a weather forecast and the accuracy of a horoscope.
That knowledge is gold. But if it stays in one person’s head, it is not an operating model. It is a single point of failure wearing comfortable shoes.
This is where Invent and Simplify asks for a more disciplined kind of creativity. Do not just admire the clever workaround. Convert the learning. What did the person notice? What did they do differently? What should the business change so the next customer does not need the same rescue?
That is invention with dirt under its nails. Not shiny. Not innovation wearing a branded hoodie and saying “disrupt” near a whiteboard. Practical invention. The kind that turns repeated rescue work into better standard work.
What the workaround is teaching you
A workaround tells you three things if you are willing to listen.
First, it tells you where the current process does not match reality. Second, it tells you who is carrying the hidden effort. Third, it tells you what customers may already be feeling before they complain.
This is where small businesses have an advantage. In a giant organisation, a workaround can live for years because it crosses too many teams, tools and approval layers. Everyone knows it is awkward. Everyone also knows fixing it may require a steering committee, a roadmap and three meetings where the same slide is presented with a different title.
A smaller business can move faster. The owner can see the pattern, test a change and update the way of working before the workaround has time to start charging school fees.
That agility should be used. Not to keep improvising forever, but to shorten the distance between learning and improvement. The goal is not to punish the workaround. The goal is to harvest it.
Ask what the workaround prevented. Ask what made it necessary. Ask what would make it unnecessary next time. Those three questions are small enough to use in a busy business and sharp enough to matter.
This is also where the language matters. When we call something “just how we do it,” we can accidentally protect a bad process from being improved. When we call it a workaround, we admit something important: this is not the best design. It is a temporary response to a gap.
That honesty is useful. Because once a workaround is named, it can be managed. It can be measured. It can be replaced with something cleaner. It can move from one person’s memory into a checklist, a standard message, a packaging rule, a stock routine or a customer update that does not depend on panic. That is simplification, but it is also invention. You are inventing a better way to carry the work.
Quietly less nonsense
The trap is thinking invention must look impressive. Many business improvements look boring from the outside because they are supposed to. A clearer handoff. A better stock marker. A packaging rule that prevents damage before the courier gets creative. These things do not trend on LinkedIn with dramatic music, but they stop the same problem from eating the afternoon.
That is what raising the standard often looks like. Quietly less nonsense.
The big brothers understand this too. At scale, repeated exceptions are expensive. Every manual rescue costs time. Every unclear step adds contact. Every hidden workaround becomes a risk when volume grows. Big systems are forced to learn this because chaos at scale becomes very loud, very fast.
Local businesses can learn it earlier. Before ten orders become a hundred. Before one person’s memory becomes the business plan. Before every customer issue needs a heroic intervention and a voice note beginning with “Hi, sorry man.”
Invent and Simplify is asking you to protect the parts of the business that make customers trust them. Warmth is better when the basics work. Flexibility is better when it is not covering for confusion. Human service is better when it is not constantly rescuing a process that refuses to grow up.
So keep the make-a-plan energy. Keep the creativity. Keep the local agility that helps a business survive the weird Tuesday. But when the same workaround appears again, do not just thank it and send it back into the veld. Ask what it is teaching you. Because the first time you create a workaround, you may be rescuing a customer. The second time, you may be noticing a pattern. The third time, dear seller, you may be looking at your next invention.
A workaround is not a business model. It is a clue.
This is a personal thought piece, written from my own customer experience and process improvement perspective. It draws on publicly available information and reflects my own views.