3 May 2026
Dual systems and the quiet tax
Every “single source of truth” announcement I have sat through had a second source by Thursday. The second source is usually a workbook named after a person who left. It survives because it answers a question the official tool answers slowly, or answers with a field nobody trusts.
Calling this resistance is a category error. People do not maintain a shadow file for sport. They maintain it because a truck is waiting. The tax is the rekeying, the reconciliation on Friday, and the argument about which number the customer heard.
In week four of the flagship programme we ask participants to estimate that tax in hours for one job family, not for the whole company. Company-wide estimates become theatre. One family is enough to decide whether the next initiative is a training memo or a field change.
Sometimes the official tool should win. Sometimes the workbook is the real process and the licence is a reporting skin. Pretending otherwise is how you buy a second CRM while the first one is still being “adopted”.