I once worked at an upscale office furniture manufacturer. On paper, it was a well-run operation: custom office screens, high-end fabrics, aluminium extrusion systems, and complex workstation builds. In reality, the company ran on something far more fragile than it appeared.
Most of its systems lived in people’s heads.
I was hired initially into the factory, then tasked with working alongside the director to design a new office screen system using AutoCAD. The technical work itself wasn’t the hard part. What became immediately clear was that nothing was formally structured. Every process depended on who you asked. Every task began with, “Go ask someone where that is.”
The storeroom told the real story.
Critical components—rubber extrusions, fasteners, packaging—were scattered with no itemisation, no logic, no inventory system. Knowledge, not structure, kept the place running.
I volunteered to rebuild the storeroom from scratch. I catalogued parts, created order, and made the system legible. The work was accepted. The resentment followed soon after. Not because the work was wrong, but because I hadn’t asked permission from the people whose informal authority depended on that disorder.
After six months, I moved into the office full time. My role became detailing every incoming job: listing every component for pricing, tracking fabrics, MDF frames, polystyrene fillers, internal hardware, aluminium frames, powder coating. Each screen variation introduced new combinations and new opportunities for error. The process was slow, brittle, and exhausting.
So I proposed a different approach.
I built a parametric modelling system. Screen width and height went in. Cutting lists, material quantities, and pricing came out. The system updated automatically across product lines. Workstations were added. Repetition disappeared. Accuracy improved. Manufacturing and pricing finally spoke the same language.
Once that system was complete, I began documenting processes to make onboarding possible for future staff. Not as theory, but as lived workflows. How work actually moved through the company.
That’s when the discomfort intensified.
The factory tolerated me more over time. Systems help the floor first. Management, however, grew increasingly hostile. The software was expensive. Expectations rose. Courtesy fell away. What had changed wasn’t performance. It was visibility.
By making processes explicit, the company lost something it had relied on without admitting it: ambiguity.
And ambiguity had been doing quiet political work.
From a systems perspective, nothing here is unusual.
Organisations built on tacit knowledge often resist formalisation because documentation doesn’t just improve efficiency. It redistributes power. When systems are explicit, indispensability fades. Accountability sharpens. Authority can no longer hide inside “how things are usually done.”
At the same time, I was dealing with mental health challenges I didn’t yet understand. I was carrying high cognitive load, social friction, and responsibility without psychological safety. That combination takes a toll, even when the work itself is sound.
When I eventually left, I did so with clarity.
The company hadn’t rejected me because the work failed.
It rejected what the work revealed.
I had turned fragile, human-held complexity into durable structure. Inventory coherence replaced chaos. Pricing became deterministic. Manufacturing became predictable. Knowledge stopped being trapped in individuals.
Those are senior, systems-level contributions. They are rarely celebrated in environments not ready to evolve.
Sometimes you don’t fail to belong in a system.
You simply expose the fact that it cannot yet survive clarity.
