The Spice Jar Rebellion: How I Created a Beautiful Carousel of Confusion

A few weeks ago, I did something that seemed perfectly logical: I threw out every mismatched spice jar in my cabinet and replaced them with uniform glass containers and matching labels.

What resulted was a Pinterest-worthy spice cabinet that would make Marie Kondo weep. The lived reality since last week has been that I now spend five minutes hunting for red chilli flakes because my brain was hardwired to look for that distinctive squat red McCormick container, not a sleek glass cylinder in minimalist, sometimes illegible sans-serif.

I also bought a Lazy Susan to solve my problem of the spices hiding in the back. Except now I have what I call a "Lazy Maria" (because why should Susan get all the credit?) full of identical containers that I can't distinguish without reading every single label. I've created a beautiful, albeit standardized carousel of confusion.

The PMO Playbook Paradox

This kitchen catastrophe perfectly captures the tension at the heart of every Program Management office. We optimize for reporting consistency, then wonder why Program Managers create shadow trackers and teams develop workarounds that bypass our beautiful standardized processes.

My old spice cabinet was organizational chaos: mismatched containers from three different decades with labels that looked like archaeological artifacts. But in my standardization zealotry I lost years of learned muscle memory. The tall skinny vanilla extract bottle. The wide garlic powder container. The distinctive orange turmeric cap.

They looked like just containers, but they were a navigation system built through repeated use.

The Template Trap

Three weeks into my standardized spice life, I started developing workarounds. Arranging by usage frequency rather than color (if you know me, you know!). Leaving frequently used containers slightly askew for faster spotting. Inadvertently, I was creating a shadow system within my beautiful standardized system.

This is exactly what happens when PMOs prioritize consistency over utility. Some PMs maintain the "real" project tracker in Notion while copying summary data into the official tool. Marketing Managers create a separate campaign brief process, then translates it into corporate-speak for the standardized reports.

The PMO gets beautiful dashboards showing "consistent" project health across the organization, but the actual project management is happening in the gaps between the official system.

The Shadow System Signal

Here's my uncomfortable truth: I'm still living with my beautiful carousel of confusion because I cannot bring myself to admit that my enthusiastic, time-consuming standardization experiment basically failed. However, my workarounds are getting more sophisticated by the week.

I've started leaving the cumin container slightly askew, a visual signal that I used it recently and it's still in my “active rotation.” The all spice gets moved to the front edge after every use, creating a makeshift “recently used” zone. I've developed muscle memory for which spices live at 2 o'clock versus 7 o'clock on the ‘Lazy Maria’, completely bypassing the system I initially imposed. This shadow system is more sophisticated, more intuitive, and infinitely more useful than the beautiful failure it lives within.

Maybe that's the point.

Workarounds are not a bad thing. They're not bugs in your system, they're features that your users built because they actually understand the work better than your standardized templates do.

A PM’s Notion tracker is intelligence. Your Marketing Manager’s creative brief process is solving coordination problems your neatly documented RACI matrix can't even see.

The teams developing shadow systems are preserving essential information that your templates eliminate. They're creating navigation systems built through repeated use. Systems that are actually useful.

Every shadow system is an ode to a process that doesn't exist yet. Teams build better systems because they understand the work in ways your documentation doesn't capture yet. The trick is to take note of these, and think of them as prototypes, or clues that inform documented processes so they can evolve over time instead of becoming monoliths disguised as single sources of truth.

My paprika still lives at the front edge of the ‘Lazy Maria’, and I'm finally okay with that.