The Emergence and Evolution of Workarounds: A Study of Stability and Change

Workarounds are often assumed to be quick fixes or stable practices. As most processes tend to change over time, we investigate this assumption. In an embedded case study, we analyze 13 years of process data from a large university teaching hospital. We investigate how the ratio of 10 workarounds changes over this period. We find that some workarounds remain stable over time, while others may change suddenly, temporarily, or continuously over time. We use historical documents to identify incidents that influence the use of workarounds and find that the dynamics of a workaround may switch between temporal categories. In contrast to earlier theories, we find that workers seem to adopt workarounds based on an individual need rather than a collective adoption after one person discovers it. In addition to these additions to current theory, we suggest future work that can answer currently open questions surrounding the evolution of workarounds.