Think of a rushing river. Huge volumes of water roll through, but you still have swirling eddies and stagnant pools at the edges.

It’s the same thing. Positions get overlooked. A business practice gets outmoded but not phased out right away. Miscommunication or misalignment between departments leaves goals unclear. Perverse incentives encourage inefficient behavior.

When I worked in an office, we were running behind on inputting paper forms to the database. Because we were behind, we were ordered to hire more clerks, and did. But the bottleneck was the database; we were only allowed two connections at a time. To ensure maximum efficiency, only the two or three most experienced clerks were allowed to input to the database, and the rest of us did triage on the paper forms. I carved out a role for myself (as the roughly sixth most senior clerk) as the guy who trained new hires how to pre-process the forms. And I was always busy, because we were always hiring, because we were ordered to, because we were further and further behind, because of the database bottleneck that adding more staff did nothing to address. I came away with six extra weeks of pay and two letters of recommendation, and I haven’t worked an office job since.