Peter LohmannAll Things Residential Property Management | CEO of RL Property Management | Co-Founder of Crane

Spreadsheets aren’t systems 🙃

25 Nov 2025 · 1 min

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In this brief monologue, Peter Lohmann argues that the proliferation of spreadsheets, Airtable, Notion, and similar tracking tools is often a symptom of an XY problem rather than a genuine solution. He claims that teams resort to creating spreadsheets to "track" issues when the underlying problem is social—specifically, a reluctance to enforce policies or have difficult conversations. This leads to a maze of tracking mechanisms, exceptions, and policy‑over‑policy, which he characterises as a technical band‑aid for a managerial or cultural issue.

Chapters

The evidence of an XY problem is a spreadsheet. You can quote me on that one. If your team is like, I know, we'll make a spreadsheet to track that, that's almost always the wrong answer. Um, you've got enough spreadsheets, you've got enough places to track things. You've got Airtable, you've got Notion, you've got software. There's not— there's an old saying used to hear a lot, which is you're trying to use a technical solution to solve a social problem. You see this show up a lot when business owners are afraid to enforce their policies. So instead they end up creating a maze of tracking spreadsheets and exceptions and policies to the policies with exceptions. And that— they won't have the hard conversation.