What Porridge Can Teach Us About Business: The Gap Between Systems and Reality

By Richard Faint · 11 July 2026 · 7 min read

TL;DR:

Work as Imagined is the official process described in policies and process maps; Work as Done is how people actually adapt the work under real conditions. Good product decisions study that gap instead of automating an idealised process that experienced users already know does not fit reality.

“Shut that door!”

Few sitcoms have aged as well as Porridge. First broadcast in 1974, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais’ classic comedy is remembered for Ronnie Barker’s brilliant portrayal of Norman Stanley Fletcher, a career criminal serving time in Slade Prison, and unforgettable Mr Mackay, the authoritarian prison officer convinced that discipline and procedure could solve almost every problem.

Most people remember Porridge for the laughs, Fletcher’s schemes, Godber’s innocence and Mr Mackay’s constant frustration. Yet beneath it there is a sophisticated observation about organisations. Slade Prison is simply a convenient setting for exploring one of the oldest problems in management: the difference between how organisations believe they operate and how they actually operate.

That distinction has occupied management thinkers for decades but few have articulated it better than Erik Hollnagel through the concepts of Work as Imagined and Work as Done. Once you understand these ideas, Porridge stops being merely a sitcom about prison life. It becomes a remarkably accurate study of how organisations really function.

Work as Imagined is the organisation described in process maps, organisational charts, policy manuals and standard operating procedures. It is the version executives present during strategy meetings and consultants document in PowerPoint decks. Every activity has a defined owner, every decision follows a prescribed workflow and every exception has an approved escalation path. Organisations need this model because complexity has to be simplified before it can be managed. Without agreed processes, large businesses would descend into inconsistency and confusion.

Work as Done is the organisation that exists on a wet Tuesday morning when three people are absent, a key supplier has failed to deliver, and an important customer has changed their requirements. It is the collection of adaptations, shortcuts, conversations, judgement calls and small acts of improvisation that allow work to continue despite reality refusing to follow the process documentation. Every experienced employee understands Work as Done because they live it every day, even if they have never encountered the terminology.

In Porridge, Mr Mackay represents Work as Imagined. His prison operates because there are rules. Prisoners stand where they are told, officers follow procedures and discipline maintains order. Whenever something goes wrong his instinct is entirely logical: tighten control, reinforce compliance and ensure the rules are followed more rigorously. From his perspective, if the system is not producing the expected outcome, the problem must lie with the people operating within it.

There is something distinctly Foucauldian about Mr Mackay’s worldview, whether the writers intended it or not. Michel Foucault, writing about the birth of the modern prison, argued that institutions maintain order less through force than through constant surveillance and the internalisation of discipline. His central image, borrowed from Jeremy Bentham, was the panopticon a prison designed so that inmates could never be sure whether they were being watched, and so learned to police themselves. Mackay’s patrols, his insistence on procedure for its own sake and his belief that visible order equals actual control are exactly this logic in miniature. But Foucault’s deeper point is often missed power exercised this way is never as total as it appears. Wherever discipline is imposed, people find room to manoeuvre inside it. Fletcher is that room made flesh.

Fletcher sees a completely different prison. He knows which officer will interpret a rule sensibly and which will apply it rigidly. He understands which prisoners can be trusted, who owes favours and where the unofficial lines of communication really exist. He recognises that the prison’s formal structure explains only part of how it functions. The rest depends upon human relationships, practical experience and the countless small adjustments that allow the institution to keep operating despite the unpredictability of everyday life. Fletcher isn’t successful because he ignores the system; he is successful because he understands the system more completely than the people responsible for enforcing it. It’s worth noting, though, that Fletcher’s expertise mostly serves Fletcher. His knowledge is not used for public good, it is leverage, used for extra privileges, an easier stretch and the occasional bit of contraband. Work as Done is not automatically noble just because it is human.

If Fletcher shows Work as Done as everyday improvisation, Genial Harry Grout shows what happens when that informal layer matures into something closer to an entire parallel institution. Grout, the prison’s resident crime boss, runs rackets, controls contraband and settles disputes from his cell, all while the official org chart insists that the governor and his officers are the ones in charge. Nobody wrote Grout’s operation into the prison’s procedures, and yet it is arguably more reliable and better understood by the inmates than half the rules Mackay polices. That is the uncomfortable lesson of Work as Done taken to its extreme: when the formal system leaves a vacuum, something will fill it, and that something answers to its own logic rather than the organisation’s stated goals. The 1979 film pushes the point further. Fletcher is ordered to organise a celebrity-versus-prisoners football match, entirely within the rules and fully sanctioned by the governor. The match itself is Work as Imagined in its purest form: a wholesome, approved, photogenic event. What nobody in authority clocks is that the fixture is being used as cover for an escape attempt, arranged by people who understood the prison’s actual weak points far better than the people who approved the fixture list. The official process was followed to the letter. It just wasn’t looking at the right thing.

Walk into almost any organisation today and you will find exactly the same tension, and digital transformation is where it shows up most visibly. Businesses embarking on a transformation programme frequently assume that technology alone will improve performance. Existing processes are mapped, workflows are automated and new software is deployed with great enthusiasm. Yet many of these programmes disappoint because they automate Work as Imagined while paying insufficient attention to Work as Done. Discovering Work as Done is a key task of Product Managers and business analysts this often involves getting your hands dirty and sitting with the people who do the job but if this is not done you will not discover the unofficial spreadsheet that everyone secretly relies upon, the experienced administrator who quietly resolves exceptions. Remove these without understanding why it exists, and the organisation often becomes less effective rather than more, no matter how much the new platform cost.

Systems thinking encourages a different response. Instead of asking why people are failing to follow the process, it asks why intelligent, experienced people repeatedly adapt it in the same way. Every workaround tells a story. If experienced employees consistently bypass a particular approval stage, perhaps the approval process no longer reflects the realities of the business. If teams maintain a shadow spreadsheet alongside an expensive enterprise platform, perhaps the platform is failing to support an important operational need. The adaptation is not necessarily the problem; it may be the symptom of a deeper design flaw.

None of this means organisations should abandon processes or celebrate disorder. Rules matter. Standardisation improves safety, quality and consistency. Mr Mackay is not wrong to believe that Slade Prison requires discipline, just as businesses require governance, controls and clearly defined responsibilities. The mistake lies in believing that procedures alone are sufficient. Managers cannot anticipate every circumstance, and no manual can describe every decision an experienced employee will eventually face. Organisations succeed not because people follow instructions without thinking but because they combine structure with judgement.

Mr Mackay believed Slade Prison was governed by rules, Fletcher understood that it was governed by people, Harry Grout understood that it could be quietly run by whoever the rules failed to notice.

The most successful organisations recognise that all three are true at once. They invest in good systems and good processes, but they also spend time understanding how work is really performed rather than how they imagine it to be and they stay alert to the fact that, left unchecked, an unattended gap will eventually be filled. In doing so they close the distance between Work as Imagined and Work as Done a gap that Porridge was exposing, and laughing at, decades before management theorists gave it a name.

So before your next process redesign or platform rollout, find your organisation’s Fletchers and Grouts. Ask them what the shadow spreadsheet does that the official system doesn’t. Ask them which step they skip, and why, and who quietly benefits from the workaround existing. You may not like everything you hear — but you’ll learn more about how your business actually runs than any process map will ever tell you.

Try it interactively. Open the Work as Imagined diagnostic on its own page → — full-width, with a walkthrough of what each control does.

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