Claudio Ciborra's The Labyrinths of Information relates these problems with constant continuous process improvement in the IT field:
  • Excessive idealism - encouraging disillusion, frustration, and cynicism
  • Speed and oblivion - "new" endlessly supplants the "incompletely implemented"
  • Carbon copy projects - followed "disgruntingly" as bureaucratic procedure
  • Narcissism - "strong actors" become the main driving force, creating a double bind: is this systemic rigor or forceful leadership?
  • Technical bias - creativity is evicted by the "concern for the careful management of the means"
  • Totalitarian bias - drastic simplification of reality
  • Ideological drift - preaching encapsulates science
Claudio Ciborra claims that his research concludes that "Painful and slow alignment of people, methods, and systems is the stuff of which actual implementation processes are made."

One of the biggest gaps in knowledge and education out there with regards to agile methodologies, a process improvement framework,  is the area of introducing agile methodologies successfully to an organization which is either mired in self-hate or has a culture of resistance to change.  People claim successes with small teams, and that's not to be denied, but that's clearly the "happy path" where (smaller) companies realize they have to align with the improvement process and try something new or cease to exist or a pilot team of 5 or less can "show successes" and then evangelize to the larger organization.   (I'd argue that if the  larger organization is resistant, no matter how  successful the smaller canary team is, they'll be ignored.)

Further, constantly looking for process improvements and grasping for leadership seem to have similar appearances of desperation.

In my experience with attempting to improve the processes at my work, I find these symptoms to be prevalent as well as the conclusion to be true: it's painful and slow and aligning people and methods is not easy.