The first version of a process is the one someone designs. The second version is the one people create once they learn how to work the system. That second version is where the game begins.
Once people figure out which numbers matter most, what gets rewarded, punished, delayed, or ignored, they start adjusting to the system around them. If a support team is judged by how many tickets get closed, closing tickets can become more important than solving the customer’s actual problem. If project status is judged by how long something stays green, bad news may wait until it is too large to hide. If customer service is judged by how quickly the first reply goes out, speed starts to matter more than whether the answer was actually helpful.
“Most games do not begin because the original process is pointless. They begin because the process creates a target that busy people can satisfy in the fastest acceptable way.”
The same pattern shows up in management systems built around billable time, where the business tracks how many paid hours are assigned to client work. That number can genuinely help leaders plan staffing and revenue. But once the monthly total becomes the clearest source of pressure, the process starts teaching a different lesson: keep the hours moving, even when the work itself needs more time, clearer decisions, or better sequencing.
That’s why process problems are often misread as discipline problems. People are not always ignoring the process. More often, they’re following exactly what the process teaches them to protect.
The Original Process Makes Sense
That distinction matters because the designed version of a process is often not the problem. After all, a process is simply the path that repeated work follows, whether it is written down, built into a tool, talked through in meetings, or just understood by habit. It gives people a default way to move from one step to the next, so the same decision does not have to be rebuilt from scratch every time.
That’s why the original process often makes sense in practice. A support queue gives customer problems somewhere to go, a budget approval process decides who can spend money and when, and a status report gives managers a way to see whether work is healthy, blocked, or at risk. A checklist for required steps does something similar. It helps keep important work from being skipped when people are busy, rushed, or distracted.
For the people responsible for managing projects timelines, budgets, staffing, client requests, and the order in which work gets done, the process can also seem genuinely practical. In a healthy version, it helps them raise risks early, explain tradeoffs, and keep small problems from turning into expensive ones. But every step also creates something people can learn, which phrase gets approval, which number ends the meeting, which box needs to be checked, which delay works, and which answer makes the problem go away for now.
Most games do not begin because the original process is pointless. They begin because the process creates a target that busy people can satisfy in the fastest acceptable way. That is where the official version and the practiced version start to pull apart.
The Gamed Version Takes Over
The split starts once the official process and the gamed process stop pointing to the same behavior. The official version may say the goal is to plan work responsibly, assign people carefully, and keep track of whether projects are healthy. The gamed version teaches something simpler instead. Keep the month covered, keep the hours assigned, and keep the reports showing movement.
In a client-service business, this shift tends to show up inside the ordinary rhythm of planning meetings. A leadership meeting that is supposed to review the work instead begins to revolve around whether enough paid hours are lined up for the month. A conversation that should ask what the work needs next starts asking which people still need billable work, meaning work that can be charged to a client. Even the meetings meant to look at future business starts filling next month’s gaps instead of scanning for what is actually coming.
“People may not feel like they are hiding anything, because the gamed version already feels normal.”
And this does not require anyone to admit that the game has changed. It shows up through small decisions that become easier to make over time. Work scheduled for later gets moved earlier because it fills an open gap, tasks begin before the previous step is finished since waiting leaves people unassigned, and review time shrinks because the month needs movement. A project can even look healthier in the reports simply because hours are being logged, while the actual work underneath carries more uncertainty, rework, or unfinished decisions than the report lets on.
This is how the gamed process starts to feel normal. The process still looks like it’s working, because meetings happen, plans get updated, and reports show activity. But the gamed version of the process starts to matter more than the original one. The visible target gets satisfied, even when the work itself needs something different.
Someone Has to Manage the Gap
Once the gamed version takes over, it creates a gap between what the process says it protects and what the process actually rewards. That gap is not abstract. It shows up in the work itself, in rushed steps, skipped review, unclear decisions, weaker handoffs, extra rework, and progress that looks cleaner in a report than it feels to the people actually doing the work.
The pressure usually lands on whoever has to make the work look coherent after the system has already started rewarding shortcuts. In a client-service setting, that might be the person managing timelines, budgets, client expectations, and the order in which work should happen. In another setting, it might be the person receiving the incomplete handoff, fixing the rushed decision, explaining the missed detail, or trying to make the next step work without information that should have been settled earlier.
That person is no longer only responsible for the work itself. They are also responsible for managing the gap between what the system accepts and what the work actually needs. The work keeps moving, but more effort goes into cleaning up, explaining, or working around the consequences of the gamed process. That gap does not stay contained for long.
One Game Creates Another Game
But once a gap has to be managed, another game begins! The first game satisfies the visible requirement. The next one manages whatever the shortcut leaves behind. That is how a process can keep looking orderly while the work underneath becomes harder to trust.
A ticket system can begin with a simple goal: making sure customer problems get tracked and answered. Once closed tickets become the target, the game can turn into closing issues quickly enough to keep the number healthy. If the same problem comes back, another game begins. The team may solve it this time, or it may look for another way to move the issue out of the current reporting window. Rename it, recategorize it, split it into a new ticket, send a temporary answer, or close it again to buy more time. The number stays clean for the moment, while the real problem waits for the next round.
“The warning sign is not always a bad result. Often, it is a clean result that needs too much explaining.”
A status report can follow a similar path. Its original purpose is to show whether work is healthy, blocked, or at risk. But once red status creates too much trouble, the game becomes keeping the report as green as possible for one more week, one more meeting, or one more reporting cycle. The risk gets softened, renamed, pushed into side conversations, or described as something being monitored. When the problem finally surfaces, the next game becomes explaining why it looked manageable right up until the moment it could no longer be described that way.
This is why the game becomes hard to escape. Once people learn how to satisfy the visible requirement, the work the shortcut did not solve still has to be explained, delayed, renamed, softened, or defended. The first shortcut may keep the number clean for the moment, but the next layer of work becomes protecting the story that shortcut created. At that point, people are no longer only doing their work. They are also maintaining the story around why the work still looks acceptable when parts of it no longer hold up. The game spreads because the cost of the first shortcut has to be managed elsewhere.
Spotting the Game as It Forms
The warning sign is not always a bad result. Often, it is a clean result that needs too much explaining. A report can tell leadership the work is fine while the real conversation happens somewhere else, between the manager and the person actually doing the work. A ticket gets marked closed, then the same issue resurfaces under a new ticket a week later, so the count only looks better because the problem gets pushed past the point where anyone is still watching for it. Money gets spent from the budget, and no one can quite explain what got better, what got built, or which decision improved because of it. Even a handoff marked complete can leave the next person chasing down missing context before real work can continue.
Anyone affected by the work should pay attention to the gap between what the system accepts and what the work actually needs. If people already know which phrase gets approval, the approval process is rewarding language more than substance. The same goes for exceptions. Once they happen often enough that everyone expects them, the exception path becomes part of the real workflow rather than a departure from it. And if the same problem keeps returning under new names, the ticket queue, meeting, report, or review step may just be moving the issue along instead of actually solving it.
The deeper warning sign shows up when the workaround stops looking like a workaround. The green status, the closed ticket, the spent budget, the completed handoff, or the approved request becomes the place everyone has to manage from. People may not feel like they are hiding anything, because the gamed version already feels normal. At that point, the gap is no longer treated as a gap. It is treated as how the work gets done.
Living Inside the Game
Once the gamed version becomes normal, adding another process meant to bring the work back to reality does not guarantee that reality comes back. A new meeting, report, approval, checklist, review, or rule may be created to catch the problem, but people can learn how to satisfy that process too. They learn how to phrase the update, soften the risk, close the item, complete the form, or explain the shortcut in a way that fits what the system already accepts. The original work gets farther away, while people inside the system add more language, steps, and paperwork around the version that already counts as acceptable.
This is not only a workplace pattern. People do this everywhere. They do it even with a simple question they ask every day at work and in ordinary life: “How are you?” That question may have started as an opening for real conversation, but over time it turned into a kind of social password that expects no real answer. The words stay the same, the exchange continues, and everyone understands the unspoken rules. After enough repetition, the hollow version stops feeling hollow. It just feels normal.
Work systems can drift that way too. A “green status” that hides unresolved risk becomes normal. So does a “closed ticket” for a problem that never actually gets fixed. “Maintenance work” may really mean spending down leftover budget before the year ends so next year’s budget does not shrink. A “completed handoff” may still be missing context, documentation, or the materials the next person actually needs. Each layer may start as a practical adjustment to survive the one before it, but eventually people are no longer covering up the original problem. They are maintaining the whole world that all those earlier cover-ups created.
That is why the final question cannot only be whether people are following the correct steps of a process. It has to be whether those steps still lead back to the thing the process was originally supposed to produce. Because once the game becomes the accepted reality, people are no longer working around the process. The workaround has become the process.