Your Business Is Full of Desire Paths. Are You Building Around Them?

In the 1970s, Ohio State University had a problem. They were building a new campus and needed to decide where to put the sidewalks. The standard approach was obvious: look at the architectural plans, draw straight lines between the buildings, and pour the concrete.

They didn’t do that.

Instead, they waited. They let students walk across the grass for a full year. They watched where the grass wore away: the unofficial trails that formed naturally where people actually wanted to go. Only then did they build the sidewalks, following the paths that had already emerged.

These worn tracks are called desire paths. A viral TikTok explaining the concept (2.3 million views and counting) puts it simply: “They reveal living beings’ instincts and aversions.”

Your business is full of them. You just haven’t looked.

Desire Paths in Business

The same pattern shows up constantly in successful companies. Not because anyone planned it, but because someone paid attention to what people were already doing.

Twitter didn’t invent hashtags or @-mentions. Users started typing them to solve problems the platform hadn’t addressed. Twitter’s engineers noticed, then built them into the product.

Instagram began as Burbn, a check-in app with photos as a side feature. The founders watched their users and noticed something: nobody cared about check-ins. Everyone was using it for the photos. So they stripped everything else away and built the app people were actually trying to use.

YouTube started as a video dating site. Users had other ideas. They wanted to upload videos of anything. The founders followed the desire path and pivoted.

Slack was an internal tool at a gaming company. The game failed. But the communication tool employees kept using, the one that actually made their work easier, became a $27 billion company.

In every case, the successful path wasn’t the one on the blueprint. It was the one people were already walking.

The Desire Paths in Your SME

Desire paths aren’t just a tech startup phenomenon. They’re everywhere in SME operations. And unlike Ohio State’s worn grass, they’re often invisible to leadership because nobody talks about them.

Shadow IT is a desire path. When your team uses personal Dropbox accounts, Google Sheets, or WhatsApp groups instead of the approved enterprise tools, that’s not non-compliance. That’s a signal. The official path has too much friction, and people have found a faster way to get where they need to go.

The Excel everywhere phenomenon is a desire path. If your sales team exports CRM data to a spreadsheet every week to do their reporting, your CRM is wrong. Not technically. Functionally. The tool doesn’t match how they actually work, so they’ve built a workaround.

Unofficial processes are desire paths. The “official” workflow says one thing, but everyone knows the real process happens three steps earlier when someone sends a Slack message to the right person. The documented procedure is fiction. The workaround is the operating reality.

Ad-hoc communication is a desire path. When your team defaults to informal channels instead of your formal ticketing system, they’re voting with their behaviour. The ticketing system is too slow, too bureaucratic, or too disconnected from the actual problem.

These aren’t failures of compliance. They’re signals. The tools people actually use reveal where the friction is. The workarounds show you what the official process gets wrong.

Most SMEs never map these paths. They enforce the official routes. They buy better tools for the documented workflow. They train people on the process as designed.

Meanwhile, the desire paths keep forming, and keep invisible.

Why This Matters for AI Implementation

Here’s where this gets expensive.

Most SMEs approaching AI make the same mistake: they try to automate their official processes. The ones in the manual. The ones they tell you about in board meetings. The ones that look sensible on a flowchart.

They build AI around the prescribed path. And they miss the desire paths entirely.

The result is predictable. The AI system works beautifully for the official workflow that nobody actually uses. It fails for the real workflow: the one happening in WhatsApp groups, spreadsheets, and informal handoffs. The AI becomes another layer of friction on top of a process that was already bypassed.

The real value in AI implementation isn’t automating what you say you do. It’s finding where people are actually working and building there first.

Those workarounds, those spreadsheets, those shadow systems running parallel to your CRM: that’s where your AI should go. That’s where the friction is concentrated. That’s where automation actually saves time instead of creating more process.

The Ohio State principle applied: don’t build the sidewalk until you’ve watched where people walk.

How to Find Your Desire Paths

You don’t need a consultancy engagement to start mapping this. You need curiosity and a willingness to ask questions that might have uncomfortable answers.

Shadow your team. Not in a creepy way. Spend a day watching how work actually flows. Where does information really come from? What tools are open on their screens? Where do they switch between systems? The gaps and switches are where desire paths form.

Ask about workarounds. Directly. “What do you do when the official process doesn’t work?” “What spreadsheets have you built that I don’t know about?” “If you had to get something done fast, what would you skip?” People know. They just don’t volunteer it.

Follow the data. Where does information get re-entered? Where do people export and re-import? Where are the version control nightmares? Every manual data transfer is a desire path screaming for attention.

Listen for the phrases. “I just…”, as in “I just email it to Sarah instead.” “Everyone knows…”, as in “Everyone knows the real deadline is three days earlier.” “It’s quicker if…”, as in “It’s quicker if I do it this way.” These are signposts to desire paths.

Map the unofficial org chart. Who do people actually go to for answers? Which Slack channels matter? Which meetings are actually decision-making forums? The real power structure often has nothing to do with the org chart, and everything to do with who can actually get things unblocked.

When Not to Follow the Desire Path

There’s a caveat, and it’s important.

Sometimes prescribed paths exist for good reasons. Safety. Compliance. Legal requirements. Audit trails. The desire path principle has limits.

If the workaround creates liability (bypassing financial controls, skipping data protection steps, working outside regulatory boundaries) then the desire path is a problem to solve, not a signal to follow. Your AI implementation needs to bring that work back into compliance, not automate the shortcut.

The question is: does this desire path exist because the official route is poorly designed, or because the official route is necessary and people are avoiding it? The former is an opportunity. The latter is a risk.

Know the difference.

The Ohio State Principle

There’s a philosophy here that applies well beyond sidewalks.

Ohio State could have built the paths they assumed people would want. Straight lines, geometric efficiency, architectural elegance. It would have looked right. It would have been wrong.

Instead, they observed. They waited. They built around behaviour, not assumption.

Most AI implementations do the opposite. They start with the technology, then look for places to apply it. They automate the process as documented, then wonder why adoption stalls. They build the sidewalk where it looks like it should go, then watch people walk on the grass beside it.

The businesses that get AI right, the ones that actually see productivity gains instead of pilot project graveyards, do something different. They find the desire paths first. They build where people are already walking. They automate the workaround, not the official process.

Your business is full of desire paths. The question is whether you’re paying attention to them, or still building sidewalks nobody uses.

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Sources and Further Reading

• @dspacestv on TikTok: the viral desire paths video (2.3M views) that inspired this article
• Ohio State University campus paths: the canonical example of building infrastructure around observed behaviour
• “Pave the cowpaths”: principle attributed to web standards pioneer Steven Champeon (1999), formalise patterns users create rather than forcing prescribed workflows
• Twitter hashtag origin: Chris Messina proposed the hashtag in 2007; Twitter adopted it as a feature after users made it a convention
• Instagram’s pivot from Burbn: founders stripped the check-in app down to photos after watching what users actually did
• Slack’s origin story: internal communication tool at a failed gaming company became a $27B product
• Shadow IT in UK businesses: research on unofficial tool usage in enterprise environments

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Sources

1. Ohio State University desire paths: The campus design story is documented in multiple urban planning texts. The most cited reference: Campus: An American Planning Tradition (Paul Venable Turner, 1984) and widely referenced in design literature including 99% Invisible.

2. Twitter hashtags: Chris Messina proposed the hashtag in August 2007. Documented in his original blog post and Wikipedia.

3. Instagram’s pivot from Burbn: Kevin Systrom discussed the pivot in a 2012 interview with The Atlantic.

4. YouTube’s pivot: The video dating origin is documented in Time Magazine’s 2006 profile and cofounder Steve Chen’s interviews.

5. Slack’s origin: Stewart Butterfield detailed the origin in a 2014 interview with Fast Company and Wired.

6. Desire paths concept: The term originates in landscape architecture and urban planning, with academic usage dating to the 1960s. See: Wikipedia - Desire path.

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Squared Lemons helps UK SMEs find their desire paths before building anything. If you’re planning an AI implementation, start with where your team actually works, not where your process manual says they should.

Talk to us about finding your desire paths