Invisible Lines
I tried to send a piece of work to a client this week, something built in Articulate Rise, commissioned and paid for, ready to go, and it couldn’t be sent. The reason was that we sit in different data centres, and the functionality Articulate has built doesn’t allow file transfers between them; the contract, the work, the effort, all rendered pointless by an arbitrary boundary that neither of us created or has any control over.
As frustrating as that was in the moment, it got me thinking about how many invisible lines run through every organisation. Some are technological, like the one I ran into this week, where a platform decision made far from the point of work prevents that work from reaching its destination. Others are systemic, baked into how departments interact with one another, how information flows between teams, or how the incentives in one part of the business inadvertently work against the goals of another. Others are policy-driven, rooted in rules and processes that made sense when they were written but haven’t been revisited since, and now exist as friction that everyone works around but nobody questions. And some are individual: a manager who gatekeeps information, a sign-off chain that adds weeks to something that should take hours, a culture of deference that discourages people from flagging problems until those problems become crises.
These lines are, in my experience, among the biggest blockers to workplace performance, and they’re so pervasive precisely because they’re invisible. Nobody designed them as obstacles; they emerged from decisions made in isolation, systems that evolved without oversight, or habits that calcified into norms. Training people to be competent is worthwhile, but competence means very little when the environment won’t let them apply it; sometimes it’s like asking someone to perform with half their capability, and other times the line is a complete blocker that prevents any meaningful progress at all.
This is one of the reasons I consider performance consulting to be a top priority for L&D right now. If we’re serious about facilitating performance in the workplace, we have to look beyond the individual and examine the environment they’re working within, developing the ability to uncover these invisible lines and find ways to remove them, build bridges over them, or create doorways within them that allow effort to translate more directly into outcomes. Some of these lines exist for good reason, whether that’s safety, regulatory compliance, or data protection, but many exist because a vendor failed to build sensible functionality, or because a policy from 2017 hasn’t been reviewed since it was signed off.
What we can do about it
Conduct regular systems audits. Map what we consider our business processes to be, front to back and back to front, so that we can see where flow breaks down and where invisible lines are preventing work from moving freely.
Create open feedback channels. People shouldn’t have to wait until the end of a project or a certain milestone before they can flag that something isn’t working. These channels should be forever open, forever listening, and forever accepting of feedback from anyone encountering friction.
Act on feedback in a timely manner. When someone flags a blocker, it needs to be considered quickly and actioned as fast as possible to ensure people aren’t being held up in their jobs by systems problems.
Build cross-functional collaboration. Leadership, management, and the people functions of L&D, HR, and talent management all need to be working together, alongside technical departments like IT and cyber security, to ensure there are no structural, hierarchical, technological, or individual blockers to performance in the workplace. No single function has the visibility to find these lines on its own; only with all departments working cross-functionally can we develop efficient pathways to performance.
The organisations that perform well aren’t always the ones with the most talented people; they’re the ones where talented people can do their work without running into walls that shouldn’t be there.