Staring at the spinning blue circle, I feel the familiar twitch in my left eyelid-the one that only appears when I am forced to interact with ‘efficiency.’ I am trying to submit a claim for a £12 train ticket. The new system, which I am told cost roughly 575,000 pounds and took 15 months to implement, is currently demanding a ‘Cost Centre Verification Token.’ I don’t have a token. Nobody has a token. In fact, the person who was supposed to issue the tokens left the company 45 days ago, and her position was replaced by an AI chatbot that only understands queries regarding the holiday policy in the Singapore office.

This is the Great Digital Delusion. We operate under the touching, almost childlike belief that if we buy expensive enough software, our underlying cultural rot will simply evaporate. It’s like painting a house that has termites; the fresh coat of ‘Eggshell White’ looks lovely for about 15 minutes, right up until the porch collapses under your feet. We are obsessed with the tool, but we are terrified of the truth: our processes were broken long before the first line of code was written for the new platform.

The Reality of Automated Inspection

The Cinnamon in the Spice Rack

This is exactly what we do in the corporate world. We take a process-like, say, hiring-and instead of fixing the fact that we take 125 days to make an offer, we buy a recruitment platform that uses ‘predictive analytics’ to tell us that we’re taking 125 days to make an offer. We have spent millions to confirm our own incompetence in high-definition 4K resolution. The software isn’t the solution; it’s just a very expensive mirror.

The software isn’t the solution; it’s just a very expensive mirror.

– Observation

There is a specific kind of arrogance in thinking that a SaaS subscription can fix a lack of trust. Most of the ‘extra clicks’ we complain about aren’t technical requirements; they are digital signatures of suspicion. We build 5 levels of approval into the expense software because we don’t trust the managers to manage. We add 15 mandatory fields to the CRM because we don’t trust the sales team to talk to customers. We turn the software into a digital prison guard, and then we wonder why the inmates aren’t ‘engaging’ with the new culture.

The Low-Tech Truth

True transformation is painfully low-tech. it involves sitting in a room with 5 people and asking, “Why do we actually do it this way?” and being brave enough to accept “I don’t know” as an answer. It requires us to strip away the jargon and the ‘synergistic’ nonsense and look at the bare bones of the work. If you have a chaotic, disorganized process and you digitize it, all you have is a fast, chaotic, disorganized process. You haven’t solved the problem; you’ve just made it harder to see where the bodies are buried.

I recently looked at how smaller, more agile entities handle this. They don’t have the budget for a million-dollar failure, so they have to choose tools that actually work. Take a look at how a niche retailer operates, like the way Al Fakher 30K Hypermax handles their inventory and customer flow. There is no room for 15 unnecessary clicks when a customer just wants a specific product. They prioritize the outcome over the architecture. They don’t wrap their service in layers of digital red tape because they know that in the real world, friction is the enemy of survival.

The Arrogance of Oversight

We also suffer from the ‘Feature Creep of the Soul.’ When a company buys a new tool, they feel the need to use every single function it offers, regardless of whether they need it. It’s the ‘we paid for the whole speedometer, so we’re going to use the whole speedometer’ school of management. Suddenly, a simple task like requesting a new laptop requires 25 drop-down menus, a 5-page PDF justification, and a blood sacrifice. We become servants to the tool’s capabilities rather than masters of our own needs.

I admit, I have been part of the problem. I once spent 15 hours setting up a task management system for my own writing. I had tags for ’emotional resonance,’ ‘technical accuracy,’ and ‘word count goals.’ I had automated reminders that would ping my phone every 45 minutes to ask if I was being ‘creative.’ By the end of the week, I had written exactly 5 sentences, but my dashboard was a stunning mosaic of productivity. I was a digital master of a vacant lot. I had to delete the whole thing and go back to a yellow legal pad and a pen. The pen doesn’t remind me to be creative; it just waits for me to have something to say.

What we need is to stop lying to ourselves about why the work is hard. Digital transformation is often just a very loud, very expensive way of avoiding a difficult conversation about how we treat each other and how we value time. If your software requires a 75-page manual to explain how to do something that used to take a 15-second conversation, you haven’t moved forward. You’ve just built a more elaborate maze. And while you might feel a sense of accomplishment when you finally reach the centre of that maze, remember that you’re still just a rat in a box, and the cheese was probably cheaper 15 years ago.

The Final Claim

I eventually got my £12 train ticket claimed. It took 15 emails, 5 phone calls, and a physical signature that I had to scan and upload as a PNG because the system wouldn’t accept JPEGs on Tuesdays. As I clicked the final ‘Confirm’ button, a message popped up: ‘Thank you for helping us build a more efficient future.’ I looked at my alphabetized spice rack, took out the Cinnamon-which was still under ‘V’-and decided that the future is overrated. I’d rather have the 45 minutes of my life back.

Are we building tools to help us work, or are we building altars to the idea of work? If you look closely at the next ‘game-changing’ update your company rolls out, you might find that the only thing it’s actually changing is how long it takes you to realize you’re standing still.