The Work That Was Not Logged
How unseen work quietly undermines delivery, accountability, and governance (and how AI can identify the shadow process)
Introduction
Every organisation has work that gets done properly, consistently, and often urgently… but never gets recorded anywhere.
Tasks are completed, issues are resolved, and decisions shift, yet no one can point to a ticket, a workflow step, or a logged activity that explains how it happened.
This isn’t rare.
It’s an everyday operational pattern.
And it has a cost: lost accountability, increased risk, repeated inefficiency, and fragile delivery that relies on a small group of “fixers”.
At Changeable, we refer to this pattern as:
The Work That Was Not Logged.
What “unlogged work” looks like
Unlogged work usually presents as a simple mystery:
Work appears, but no one claims it.
It shows up in a few common forms.
The “magic fix”
A system issue disappears, a customer complaint resolves, or a report comes right at the last minute. Nobody disputes that the work happened, but no one can show where it was tracked.
The mysterious spreadsheet
A critical spreadsheet becomes the source of truth for a process, even though it was created informally and maintained by one person without governance.
The unowned coordination
Meeting scheduling, chasing decisions, cleaning data, fixing handoffs, bridging gaps between teams. It keeps delivery alive, but it isn’t visible as work.
The shadow approval
Decisions occur via email, Teams chat, or a quick conversation. Later they surface as if they were formally agreed, even though there’s no audit trail.
Why it happens (it’s rarely a discipline problem)
The standard response is to assume people aren’t following process:
- “Why wasn’t this logged?”
- “Why isn’t everyone using the system?”
- “We need better compliance.”
Sometimes that’s true.
But far more often, unlogged work exists because the organisation has made logging harder than doing the work.
Common drivers include:
- logging is slow, clunky, or time-consuming
- tools are fragmented, with unclear ownership
- staff are firefighting and cannot spare admin time
- people don’t trust the workflow tools to reflect reality
- accountability is unclear, so logging feels risky
- outcomes are rewarded, not traceability
So workarounds emerge.
Not because people don’t care, but because they’re trying to keep the organisation functional.
The real cost of unseen work
Unlogged work isn’t just inconvenient. It creates structural weakness.
1) Accountability becomes political
If work cannot be proven, accountability turns into opinion. Over time this erodes trust and increases internal friction.
2) Risk becomes invisible
When decisions and actions can’t be traced, compliance and reputational risk increase, especially in regulated environments.
3) Resilience collapses
Unlogged work usually lives with one or two key people. When they leave or take leave, delivery doesn’t degrade, it fails abruptly.
4) Transformation is designed on fiction
Most transformation programmes rely on current state mapping. But if half the work is invisible, the current state model is wrong, and future state design becomes theoretical.
The AI lens: the “unlogged actor”
When work appears without ownership, there is always an actor in the system.
Not always a person. Sometimes it’s:
- a team who “just handles it”
- a vendor
- a shared mailbox
- a spreadsheet-based workaround
- a hidden admin role
- informal coordination in Teams
- a shadow queue in email
At Changeable, we call this the unlogged actor.
This is not a moral judgement. In many cases it’s heroic. But it is still a shadow process, and shadow processes carry risk because they bypass governance while shaping outcomes.
How AI identifies the shadow process
Most organisations already have the data needed to detect shadow processes.
They just aren’t using it as operational evidence.
Signals are often scattered across:
- Teams chat patterns and frequency
- email sequences and timestamps
- calendar behaviours (recurring reactive meetings)
- file version histories and edits
- system access logs
- service desk categorisation patterns
- purchase approvals and invoice timing
- repeated manual rework in spreadsheets
AI becomes valuable here not because it replaces people, but because it can detect patterns humans cannot see at scale.
What AI can do well
AI can:
- detect repeated sequences of events that imply hidden work
- identify “gap moments” where outcomes change with no recorded action
- highlight work that consistently happens around key events (month end, payroll run, governance meetings)
- surface informal dependencies between teams
- show where work is repeatedly being performed by someone with no formal accountability for it
In short: AI helps locate the unlogged actor.
Once you can see it, you can manage it.
What organisations can do once it’s visible
When shadow work is brought into the light, it unlocks practical improvements.
Reduce operational risk
Make critical work auditable and repeatable, rather than reliant on memory.
Improve delivery
Stop designing around a fake “official process” and design around real current state behaviour.
Protect key people
Invisible work creates burnout. Visibility enables redistribution, support, and realistic workload.
Improve governance without bureaucracy
Traceability doesn’t have to become a timesheet prison. With the right design, governance can be lightweight and practical.
A quick diagnostic you can run this week
If you want to assess whether unlogged work is present in your organisation, ask three people (in different roles):
- What work do you do that never gets captured anywhere?
- What breaks when you’re on leave?
- What do you do to keep things moving that isn’t in your job description?
If these questions generate strong answers, you’re already looking at shadow processes.
The question becomes: do you keep relying on them, or do you make them safe, visible, and sustainable?
Conclusion
Unlogged work is not proof your organisation is failing.
It’s usually proof your organisation is coping.
But coping behaviours are not a stable operating model.
The organisations that will succeed through the next decade won’t just be those with big strategies and transformation roadmaps.
They’ll be the ones who can see their own reality clearly, including the work that nobody claims.
Because once the shadow process is visible, it can be improved, automated, governed properly, or removed entirely.
