I have seen it many times. Someone builds a clean automation setup. Lead scoring, email sequences, CRM tags. Everything works.
Then priorities change. The person who built it moves roles. Six months later nobody remembers how it actually behaves.
Nothing is written down. No owner is assigned. The system keeps running based on assumptions that are no longer true.
The first signs are small.
A welcome email sends an outdated offer.
A contact enters two sequences at once.
A partner asks why they received three emails in four days.
You fix the email. You do not fix the system.
The real issue is not technical. The logic lives in one person’s head, and that person is no longer maintaining it.
I have audited setups where nobody could explain why a workflow triggered. Turning it off felt risky, so the team left it running.
That is not a system. It is operational debt.
The cost is not one broken campaign. It is hours spent debugging behavior nobody understands. Support questions that should never exist. Leads routed to the wrong place because a condition stopped matching reality.
The fix is simple but rarely done.
Create a single page that explains:
What the workflow does
Why it exists
Who owns it
What breaks if it stops
Update it when you change the logic.
That page becomes more valuable than the automation itself.
Because a workflow that cannot be explained or safely changed is not automation.
It is future maintenance work waiting to happen.
Build it so someone else can maintain it.
Even if that someone else is you in six months.