The most dangerous systems are not the ones that fail. They are the ones that work just well enough to resist change.

Everyone agrees the system is broken. And yet it does not change. Not because no one is trying. Not because the problems are invisible. But because the system has found a way to be broken and stable at the same time. Haiti is one of the clearest cases I know. But the pattern exists everywhere.

In Haiti, registering a business takes 12 procedures and up to 189 days. But the system is not broken in the way we usually mean. People register businesses every day. They just do it by paying intermediaries, calling in favors, and absorbing weeks of uncertainty that a standardized process could eliminate in hours.

The system functions. It just functions at a cost that most people cannot afford. And that cost is what keeps it locked in place.

I have spent the last several years studying why systems like this persist. Not why they fail, but why they stabilize. Why reforms don’t stick. Why everyone knows the process is dysfunctional and yet it does not change. The answer is not corruption, at least not in the way we usually mean it. The answer is architecture.

The Access Trap

When institutional systems are opaque, complex, and unpredictable, they generate what I call access costs: the financial, cognitive, and dignity costs of navigating a process to reach a resource that technically exists.

Financial cost is the most visible. Formal and informal fees, intermediary charges, the price of moving faster through a system that rewards those who can pay.

Cognitive cost is the hidden filter. Unclear procedures, shifting requirements, unpredictable timelines, and the mental energy of navigating a system that was not designed to be understood.

Dignity cost is the least discussed and most corrosive. This is what happens when access depends on who you know, when you must ask for favors to receive public services, when unequal treatment becomes so routine that people stop naming it.

When these costs stay high across multiple steps, something happens that I call the Access Trap. Intermediaries emerge to help people navigate the friction. Those intermediaries monetize their position. They become embedded in the system. Over time, they develop an interest in keeping the process opaque, because opacity is what makes their services necessary. Citizens adapt to the workarounds. They stop expecting the formal system to work. And the system reaches equilibrium.

Not a broken equilibrium. A stable one. One where everyone has a role, everyone has adapted, and no one has an incentive to push for redesign.

This is why single-point reforms fail. You can digitize a form, simplify a step, or open a new office. But if the rest of the chain remains high-friction, the intermediaries absorb the improvement. The overall cost of participation does not change. The bottleneck is not one step. It is the architecture of the entire process.

Haiti as proof

Haiti is the sharpest case I know. 67% of the population is excluded from formal financial services. The national utility delivers 4 to 6 hours of electricity per day. Armed groups control 80 to 90% of Port-au-Prince and charge $3 to $40 per vehicle on major roads. The country ranks 140th out of 143 on the Rule of Law Index. It scored 16 out of 100 on the Corruption Perceptions Index, its lowest ever.

And yet the economy moves. Businesses operate. Markets function. People find ways. The informal sector accounts for an estimated 35 to 50% of GDP. Remittances, nearly a third of GDP, flow through channels that bypass the formal system entirely. Mobile money platforms like MonCash serve millions who the banking system never reached.

This is not resilience in the inspirational sense. It is adaptation to a system that was never designed for inclusion. Every workaround is evidence of a design failure that someone has learned to live with.

The Access Trap explains why this does not self-correct. The workarounds are not temporary. They are the system. And the people who profit from the friction have no reason to simplify what keeps them relevant.

This is not just a Haiti problem

The Access Trap operates wherever institutional processes are opaque and discretionary. It operates when a small business owner in any city spends weeks on permits that a connected competitor resolves in days. It operates when a patient gives up on a referral because the process between two health systems is too confusing to follow. It operates when first-generation students drop out of application processes that others navigate with inherited knowledge.

The scale varies. The structure is identical. Opaque process. High cost. Intermediary capture. Adaptation. Stability.

The question I am sitting with

In a recent conversation with a business process professor at Kelley, he looked at this framework and said something that has not left me: the process itself is subjective. Two people entering the same system face completely different experiences depending on who they are. Their income, connections, geography, and legal status determine which version of the process they encounter. It is as if each person receives a different puzzle. Some get 5 pieces. Some get 50.

That reframed everything for me. If the system produces different outcomes based on who enters it, then exclusion is not a failure of the system. It is an output of the system. It is what the process was designed to produce, whether anyone intended it or not.

And if exclusion is a design output, then inclusion can be designed too.

Not through more resources. Through better process architecture. Through systems that route people toward outcomes instead of through friction. Through transparency that eliminates the market for intermediaries. Through design that makes the easiest path the correct path.

The broken systems are not waiting to be fixed. They are stable. Breaking that stability requires understanding why it holds. That is where the work begins.