Ghosts in the Machine: When Old Systems Haunt New Operations

With Halloween this week I simply have to talk about Ghosts(and Babylon 5. Shadows are scary right?). Every organization has ghosts. Old processes. Outdated policies. Decisions made years ago that no one ever questioned. They linger in the background. Invisible. Whispering “this is how we’ve always done it.” And if you’re not careful? They’ll haunt every new initiative you try to build.

In Babylon 5(The greatest TV show ever), Ambassador Londo Mollari tells a story about a palace guard. Centuries earlier, a princess saw the first spring flower bloom in the royal garden. Delighted, she ordered a guard to stand watch over it. The seasons turned. The flower wilted. The princess passed but no one ever told the guard to leave. So he stayed. Day after day. Year after year. For two hundred years. Generations came and went. Leadership changed. The reason for the order was long forgotten. Yet the post remained staffed... loyalty sustained by inertia, not intention.

You can feel these ghosts in your own systems You launch a new process… and it’s already carrying legacy bloat. You hire fresh talent… and they’re taught workarounds instead of workflows. You implement new tools… but the old ones still run in the shadows because no one ever said “stop.” These aren’t just minor annoyances. They’re operational poltergeists breaking things, wasting time, draining your energy.

The only way to get rid of these ghosts? Shine a light on them. Map every process. Find the redundancies. Name what no longer serves the mission. Cut the dead weight. If a policy exists because “someone said so” in 2012, kill it if it needed a workaround. Rebuild, don’t just patch. Stop duct-taping modern workflows onto outdated infrastructure.

The real horror story? A system that relies on institutional memory and heroic effort. The systems you inherit aren’t sacred. The culture you walked into isn’t untouchable. The way things “always worked” isn’t good enough anymore. If you want to lead, you have to be willing to burn it down and build something better. Don’t let the past haunt your future Your job isn’t to keep the ghosts comfortable. It’s to design a system strong enough that nothing lingers in the shadows.