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The Boschetto Bulletin - Shadow Work
Chris Scott
May 26, 2025
Every team has two ways of working:
The official process - what’s written down.
The actual process - what people really do to get work done.
The second one is where the real business happens.
And the longer it goes unmanaged, the more Execution Debt™ compounds beneath the surface.
I’ve seen this inside fast-scaling logistics companies, marketing orgs, enterprise ops teams — even internal PMOs.
The root problem?
Shadow work.
Untracked. Unowned. Often invisible.
But always costly.
📖 Execution Playbook: Shadow Work Is Drag You Can’t See
Shadow work = all the manual, duplicative, or off-system effort your team does to actually get work done.
It happens when:
The documented process doesn’t match reality
Tools are too rigid, so teams build workarounds
No one trusts the system to deliver fast enough
Examples:
Manually formatting reports after exports
“Quick check-in” Slacks because no one trusts the dashboard
Recreating docs because the source of truth is stale
“Fixing” deliverables mid-flight without flagging upstream issues
Each action seems small.
Together, they create invisible drag across the org.
What This Costs You
Lost hours every week → multiplied by headcount
Duplicate work → hidden from reporting
Unscalable systems → execution suffers under pressure
If your team is constantly working around the system…
Your system is broken. And that’s Execution Debt™.
🚀 Ready to Spot Your Execution Gaps?
Most businesses are losing at least $10K a year from Execution Debt™ — but they don’t realize it until it’s too late.
Take the Execution Debt™ Score Quiz and see exactly where you’re bleeding time and money.
💡 Smart Business Move of the Week
Conrad Electronics, a major European electronics retailer, faced challenges in understanding the true nature of its order-to-cash processes.
Traditional process mapping methods proved insufficient, as they relied heavily on subjective inputs and often failed to capture the complete picture.
By implementing Celonis' process mining technology, Conrad Electronics was able to visualize its processes based on actual data extracted from its systems. This approach revealed unexpected complexities and deviations from the documented procedures.
“With Celonis, we can systematically identify and eliminate inefficiencies across customer segments and material groups. That helps us delight customers – in a quantifiable way.”
Key Takeaway:
Leveraging process mining tools like Celonis can transform your understanding of business operations, revealing hidden inefficiencies and enabling data-driven improvements that traditional methods might miss.
⚡️ Execution Power-Up: Run a Shadow Work Debrief
Instead of trying to map the whole process, run this quick diagnostic after one key project or deliverable ships:
Ask the people doing the work:
“What steps did you take that weren’t part of the SOP?”
Log them. Review them.
Don’t correct people — learn from them.
Shadow work isn’t employee failure.
It’s a signal that your system doesn’t reflect how work actually gets done.
Fix that first.
🎯 Boschetto Consulting - Eliminating Execution Debt™
Solving problems is what we do. Scaling smart is how we do it.
Struggling with Execution Debt™? Let’s fix it.
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