If you spend any time looking at how teams or organisations work, you start to see recurring themes. Depending on your outlook or methods you might regard them as anti-patterns, or causal loops, or something entirely different.
The Workaround Spiral is my favourite. I first saw it in software development but it occurs anywhere where people are being put under unnecessary pressure, or wherever the cursed term 'quick win' rears its unwelcome head.
It goes like this:
1) We have a lot to do, and not a lot of time. There isn't time to focus on quality, so we’ll put a workaround in place. It’s okay, we’ll fix it later.
2) We have even more to do, and even less time. We don’t have the time or energy to fix the workaround, so it just stays there.
3) Whoever put the workaround in place gets distracted by something else. Or forgets all about it. Or leaves. New people come in and start using the workaround as if it were the intended design.
4) The workaround is now a standard operating procedure. The older the workaround gets, the more difficult it gets to address, so people avoid addressing it. If it is questioned, people talk about it as "the way we've always done things around here".
5) There is a drive for efficiency. The workaround is carefully examined and streamlined, allowing us to do the wrong thing in a shorter time, with less resource.
6) Efficiently doing the wrong thing means it happens more often. This creates a number of new problems we will have to address immediately.
7) We have a lot to do, and not a lot of time. There isn't time to focus on quality, so we’ll put a workaround in place. It’s okay, we’ll fix it later.
It's my favourite because fixing it doesn't require a detailed postmortem, or extensive analysis, or blame. You can just recognise it, and stop.
But wherever a senior stakeholder insists on hitting a deadline in the face of all contrary advice, or whenever someone uses the phrase "just get it over the line", the workaround spiral will appear.