Remember Tetris?

Companies play it all the time.

Why?

Processes.

In Tetris, the next shape always appears unexpectedly.

And every time, you try to find the best possible place for it.

At first, everything looks fine.

• The shapes fit.
• The lines build up neatly.
• It even feels a bit elegant.

Then an awkward shape appears.

And you put it somewhere that clearly does not belong there.

• It looks wrong.
• A bit crooked.
• But the game continues.

Then a few more normal shapes arrive, and they cover the mess.

From the outside, everything looks fine again.

That is exactly how processes build up inside companies.

• A new client.
• A new employee.
• A new approval step.
• A new tool.
• A new workaround.
• A new exception.

Each time, people try to place the new piece in the best spot available.

Not the perfect spot.

The available one.

And if it more or less works, nobody wants to touch it.

• “It works, so why break it.”
• “That is just how it evolved.”
• “We’ve always done it this way.”

Over the years, the whole system starts looking normal from the inside.

But only because layer after layer has been placed on top of older strange decisions.

What is missing is not another shape.

It is a fresh look at the board.

Because at some point, historical logic stops being useful logic.

And that is where growth starts slowing down.

So next time you run into a strange process in a company, and someone says, “It just developed this way,” remember Tetris.

We are all playing it.