Exception Tax: Designing for the 1% That Breaks Everything

Business leaders treat automation and features as win/lose outcomes: either the process works or people handle exceptions. IT inherits a growing pile of one-off fixes, tactical scripts, and emergency procedures that never get productised. This episode explains why those rare exceptions accumulate into a predictable, expensive burden—the Exception Tax—and how both sides can prevent it. I’ll explain the business incentives that accept exceptions as acceptable risk, the technical realities that make exceptions expensive to handle at scale, and a repeatable consulting approach to convert recurring exceptions into governed decisions, measurable backlog items, or intentional manual processes. Listeners will get concrete patterns to recognise exception taxation early, a lightweight template for prioritising fixes versus formalising workarounds, and short actions business and IT can start tomorrow to stop the slow drain on capacity and reliability.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/business-it-it-business--6867401/support.To continue the conversation, follow Mirko Peters on LinkedIn, where more insights and real-world examples are shared from both business and IT perspectives.