Your company runs on email
The most important software at most companies is the inbox. Approvals, prices, and decisions live there — which works, until it doesn’t.
There’s a good chance your most important software is email. Approvals happen there. Prices get quoted there. The answer to “why do we do it this way” is buried there, in a thread from two years ago, in one person’s inbox, on a phone that will be replaced this winter.
Nobody chose this. Email became infrastructure by squatting: every process without a home moved into the nearest available space, and the inbox never says no.
A system you didn’t design
It genuinely works — until it doesn’t. Until the person whose inbox holds the quoting process is on vacation and the discount rules go with them. Until a thread gets one reply too long and the decision forks into two versions that both feel final. Until someone leaves, and the two years of “why” walk out with them, discoverable only by an IT export nobody wants to do.
Email’s failure mode is that it fails silently and retroactively. The process works right up until the moment you find out it was only ever working for the people already inside it.
What moving out looks like
This is not a war on email. It’s the right tool for negotiating, announcing, arguing — conversation. The test is narrower: when a decision gets made in a thread, does it have a home outside the thread?
Anything you’d have to search your inbox to answer — what we quoted this customer, whether this order was approved, where that shipment got stuck — deserves a real home. A table. A board. A form that writes somewhere durable. The conversation can stay in email; the record can’t.
The walkthrough
Try this. Walk in tomorrow and ask operational questions, and count how many answers arrive as someone reaching for the search bar. “What did we quote them last time?” “Did anyone approve this?” Each search is a process living in an inbox, and the count is your migration roadmap, sorted by pain.
Move the worst one first. Not all of them — the ones that would hurt to lose.
Conversations belong in email. Records deserve a home that isn’t one person’s inbox.
Working on something this applies to? Tell us about it — thirty minutes, no pitch.