Twelve. No, twenty-two. I am staring at the acoustic tiles in Conference Room B while the humidity in the room rises from too many bodies and too much nervous energy. I’ve counted 42 tiles since Marcus from Marketing started his slide deck. His voice has that specific pitch of someone who believes they are delivering a sermon from the mount, but all I can see is the ghost of a deck I read 32 days ago. It was from the Logistics team. Same font, mostly. Same data points. Definitely the same conclusion.

Beside me, Sarah from Product Support is tapping her pen in a rhythm that feels like a Morse code distress signal. She’s waiting for her turn. I know what’s on her laptop. I saw her drafting it in the breakroom near the vending machine that always eats my $2 bills. She has reached the exact same realization about our customer churn that Marcus is currently explaining with a laser pointer. They have both spent, by my rough estimate, 112 hours analyzing a problem that was technically solved in a memo back in 2022. We are not just repeating tasks; we are repeating the very act of thinking, and it’s exhausting to watch.

The Cost of Redundancy

As a bridge inspector, I’m trained to look for cracks. Most people think a bridge fails because a single bolt snaps or a cable gives way in a cinematic burst of sparks. In reality, it’s usually the slow, quiet degradation of structural integrity because someone forgot to check the records of the previous repair. I once spent 52 days surveying a suspension bridge in the north, only to find a dusty ledger in the basement of the local council office that proved my entire analysis had been completed in 1972. I felt like a ghost haunting my own life. That was my first lesson in the sheer, staggering waste of duplicated cognition.

We talk about ‘process efficiency’ as if it’s a matter of moving widgets faster. But the real friction in any organization isn’t the doing; it’s the constant, recursive loop of deciding what to do, forgetting why we decided it, and then deciding it all over again six months later. It is the institutional equivalent of Alzheimer’s. We have all these tools-Slack, Jira, Notion, 82 different flavors of project management software-yet our collective memory is shorter than a fruit fly’s. We are drowning in information and starving for a single, reliable source of ‘why.’

The Redundant Variable

I remember a specific job back in 2002. It was a small stone arch bridge near a brewery. I was convinced the mortar was failing due to a specific chemical runoff. I spent 12 nights researching the soil pH and the local industrial history. I felt brilliant. I felt like a detective. Then, while looking for a ruler in the back of the truck, I found a report from a woman named Evelyn who had inspected the bridge in 1982. She had identified the exact same runoff, proposed the exact same solution, and had even attached a photo of the same crack I was so proud of finding. I wasn’t a detective; I was a redundant variable. I had wasted 12 days of my life because I didn’t think to look for what was already known.

In the corporate world, this manifests as the ‘New Initiative.’ A manager arrives with a fresh set of 22 slides, declaring a ‘pivot’ that looks suspiciously like the pivot we did in 2012. Nobody says anything. Why? Because acknowledging the repetition would mean admitting that the last three years were a hollow exercise in treading water. So we play along. We engage in the duplicated thinking. We debate the same trade-offs. We weigh the same risks. We act as if the ground under our feet is brand new, when in fact, it’s packed hard by the boots of everyone who stood here before us.

This isn’t just about saving money, though the waste probably totals in the millions-perhaps $102 million for a company of our size. It’s about human dignity. There is something fundamentally degrading about being asked to solve a puzzle that has already been solved, simply because the organization was too lazy to write down the answer. It tells the employee that their brain is a disposable filter, not a lasting contributor. We treat cognition like a single-use plastic, discarded the moment the meeting ends.

The Silent Witness

I’ve spent 42 minutes now listening to Marcus. He’s talking about ‘synergy’ and ‘customer-centric alignment.’ I want to stand up and tell him about the bridge with the mortar problem. I want to tell him that if he just looked in the ‘Archives’ folder from three years ago, he’d find a 132-page document that says everything he’s saying, but with better charts. But I don’t. I just count another 12 tiles on the ceiling. I am part of the problem. I am the silent witness to the redundancy.

The solution isn’t more software. We have enough software. The solution is a cultural shift toward respecting the ‘already known.’ It requires a level of humility that most high-achievers find painful. You have to be willing to admit that you aren’t the first person to notice a problem. You have to be willing to read the ‘boring’ documentation instead of ‘disrupting’ the space with your own redundant brilliance. It’s the difference between a craftsman who studies his predecessors and a child who just wants to knock down the blocks and start over.

When we look at businesses that actually survive for 102 years, they usually have a very high respect for the ‘way things are done’ and, more importantly, the *reason* they are done that way. They don’t strip out a structural beam just because it looks old; they check the blueprints. This is why simplicity is so powerful. If you remove the unnecessary complexity, you make it much easier to see the core logic of the operation. You stop the mental churn.

Clarity as a Shield

For instance, if you’re looking at something like Meat For Dogs, the value proposition is stripped of the usual marketing fluff that causes teams to spend 92 hours debating ‘brand voice.’ It’s direct. It solves a specific need without trying to reinvent the concept of nutrition every three weeks. That kind of clarity is a shield against duplicated thinking. When the goal is clear and the history is respected, you don’t need to spend 22 meetings a month redefining your purpose.

I’ve made mistakes in this area myself, of course. In 2012, I tried to implement a new digital logging system for our bridge inspections. I spent $72,000 of the department’s budget and 122 hours of my own time building a custom interface. It was sleek. It was modern. It was also a carbon copy of a system the drainage department had built in 2002. If I had just walked across the hall and talked to the guys in the yellow vests, I could have saved the taxpayers a lot of money and saved myself from a very embarrassing performance review. I was so caught up in being the ‘innovator’ that I forgot to be an investigator.

The Ego Drug

This desire to be the author of the solution is a powerful drug. It feeds the ego to think we are the ones who finally ‘cracked the code.’ But in a mature organization, the code is usually already cracked; it’s just buried under layers of ego and poor filing habits. We need to start rewarding the people who find existing solutions rather than the ones who create ‘new’ ones that are just old ideas in a fresh coat of paint.

[the most innovative thing you can do is often just to remember what was forgotten]

The Twin in the Room

Back in the meeting room, Marcus has finally finished. There is a polite smattering of applause. 12 people nod their heads. Now, Sarah is standing up. She looks nervous. She opens her laptop. The first slide appears on the screen. It’s a graph showing customer churn. It looks exactly like Marcus’s graph. I look at Marcus. He is looking at his phone, probably checking his email to see if anyone noticed how brilliant his presentation was. He isn’t even looking at the screen. He doesn’t realize that his twin is standing five feet away from him, repeating his words into the void.

I count the last 2 tiles in my row. That’s 152 tiles total. I know more about the ceiling of this room than I do about the ‘strategic direction’ of this company, because the ceiling is consistent. It doesn’t change its mind every 22 days. It doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not. It just sits there, holding up the roof, respecting the physics that were discovered 2002 years ago.

Valuing the “Already Known”

If we want to stop the waste, we have to start valuing the ‘Bridge Inspectors’ of the corporate world-the people who look at the history, who check the cracks, and who aren’t afraid to say, ‘We already did this.’ It’s not a popular role. It doesn’t get you a corner office or a $502 bonus. But it’s the only thing that keeps the structure from collapsing under the weight of its own redundant thoughts. I’m going to go back to my desk now. I have a report to write. I think I’ll check the 1992 files first. Just in case.