By Josh Casson

Walk across almost any university campus, public park, or corporate grounds and you are likely to see a dirt trail cutting across the grass between two sidewalks. These unofficial thoroughfares are known as “desire paths,” which are routes created by people who choose a more direct, efficient, or practical way to reach their destination rather than following the route originally designed for them.

Urban planners and landscape architects have long observed desire paths as valuable sources of information. In some cases, sidewalks are intentionally left unpaved until foot traffic patterns develop, allowing designers to see where people naturally want to walk before committing resources to permanent pathways.

For quality professionals, these informal paths offer more than an interesting metaphor. They provide a practical way to think about the gap between designed processes and lived experience inside an organization.

In organizations, processes are often designed the same way engineers design sidewalks. A team maps out a workflow, defines responsibilities, creates forms, obtains approvals, and publishes procedures. The assumption is that employees will follow the prescribed path exactly as written.

Reality, however, is rarely that simple.

Just as pedestrians create desire paths across a lawn, employees frequently create informal routes through organizational processes. They find shortcuts, eliminate steps, use alternative tools, share information differently, or bypass approvals they perceive as adding little value.

Many organizations view these deviations as problems to be eliminated immediately. Although some certainly are, that reaction can cause leaders to miss an important opportunity.

When deviations reveal waste

One of the primary objectives of quality management is building a culture focused on meeting customer needs while also inspiring continuous improvement. If employees consistently bypass a particular step, it may be worth asking why.

Consider a document approval process requiring five signatures before release. If employees repeatedly seek approvals outside the formal sequence, the issue may not be poor compliance. The issue may be that the process was designed around organizational structure rather than operational reality.

Similarly, if an audit checklist requires information from multiple systems and auditors are found to be maintaining their own spreadsheets, the spreadsheet may be a symptom of a process that needs to be simplified rather than employee resistance.

People generally want to complete their work successfully. When intelligent, experienced employees repeatedly follow the same unofficial route, there is often a reason.

The desire path may indicate:

• Excessive approvals
• Duplicate data entry
• Poor system usability
• Unclear responsibilities
• Bottlenecks

In lean terminology, the desire path often points directly toward waste.

Rather than asking, “Why aren’t people following the process?” a more productive question may be, “What is this behavior teaching us about the process?”

Not every desire path is good

Of course, desire paths are not always beneficial.

Sometimes a sidewalk exists because it safely guides pedestrians around hazards. The dirt trail through the grass may appear faster, but it could lead people into unstable terrain, restricted areas, or locations that were intentionally protected.

The same principle applies in organizational processes.

Not all steps exist because someone enjoys bureaucracy. Some steps exist because they manage risk, protect customers, preserve objective evidence, or support regulatory and contractual obligations.

The challenge for quality professionals is determining whether a desire path reveals unnecessary process complexity or whether it exposes a weakness in process discipline.

Follow the footprints

Imagine a newly installed sidewalk where hundreds of people still cut across the grass. The dirt trail clearly indicates that the official path does not align with how people actually move through the space.

Organizations should approach process deviations the same way.

Questions worth exploring include:

• Where are people deviating?
• How frequently does it occur?
• Who is doing it?
• What benefit are they gaining?
• What obstacles are they avoiding?
• What risk is created by the deviation?

A useful test is to ask whether the workaround improves flow without increasing risk. If it reduces waiting, duplication, or confusion while still preserving control, the process may need to change. If it removes a safeguard, obscures accountability, or weakens evidence, the workaround itself may need to be controlled.

The goal is not to encourage employees to ignore procedures. The goal is to understand the relationship between human behavior and process design.

Trees, fences, and poka-yoke

Desire paths are less likely to form when physical constraints naturally guide behavior.

A large tree, a fence, a retaining wall, or a pond can prevent pedestrians from creating alternative routes. These structures make the intended path both obvious and practical.

In quality management, the equivalent is poka-yoke, or mistake-proofing.

Well-designed systems make the correct action the easiest action.

Examples include:

• Software that prevents incomplete form submission
• Mechanical interlocks that prevent parts from moving forward until all tools are returned
• Barcode validation before material movement
• Automated approvals based on predefined criteria
• Fixtures that prevent incorrect assembly
• Electronic workflows that enforce sequence requirements

These controls function like fences and trees in a landscape. They reduce the likelihood of undesirable deviations while allowing work to flow efficiently.

However, if users continually search for ways around a control, the organization should investigate why. Excessive constraints can create frustration and hidden risks.

The best controls support the natural flow of work rather than fighting against it.

The role of the quality professional

The desire path concept reminds us that processes should not be judged solely by how they were designed. They should also be evaluated by how people actually use them.

A perfectly documented process that employees routinely bypass may be less effective than a simpler process that aligns with real-world behavior.

Observing desire paths can reveal opportunities to reduce waste, improve efficiency, simplify workflows, and strengthen adoption. At the same time, it can identify areas where stronger controls, clearer expectations, or better mistake-proofing are needed.

The most effective organizations learn from those footprints.

Sometimes the answer is to pave the desire path. Sometimes it is to build a fence.

The art of quality management is knowing which is which.

About the author

Josh Casson is president of HD Solutions Consulting and founder of Auditelligence, a cloud-based internal audit management platform that simplifies compliance, auditing, and continual improvement. With extensive experience in quality, aerospace, manufacturing, and management systems, he helps organizations strengthen performance, reduce risk, and build more effective business processes.