Broken Systems: What London’s Railways Can Teach Every Business

August 27, 2026

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Opinion piece by Tania Benade-Meyer, Founder and Director of mutherboard.com

There is a train that leaves London Euston most weekday evenings for Crewe. It is, by Department for Transport measurement, the busiest commuter-only service in England and Wales, and last autumn it was running at a 170% load factor, which is a polite statistical way of saying nearly double the passengers it has seats for. Regular riders describe it as “hot, sweaty and heaving,” standing in the gangways with nowhere to put a suitcase down.

One commuter recently told The Guardian that a single delay once turned his journey home into a five-hour ordeal after he missed his connection. He said he’d learned to just be grateful when the train left on time at all.

If that sounds familiar, you’re not imagining it. It’s the daily condition of a lot of Britain’s railway.

The latest regulator figures show 86.4% of trains arriving within three minutes of schedule, which sounds respectable until you remember that means roughly one in seven services misses even that generous window (ORR). Delays and cancellations cost passengers close to 42 million hours in the year to May 2026, a bill The Telegraph puts at around £1.3bn to the economy. Compensation payouts for delays hit £169m last year alone, a 12% jump on the year before (The Telegraph).

Even the cows occasionally get a say, with a herd wandering onto the West Coast Main Line bringing services to a standstill for over three hours this summer (The Guardian).

And that’s before anyone tries to actually get work done on board. Ofcom testing found onboard Wi-Fi meets a basic “good performance” standard just 1% of the time, and that nearly half the internet network still runs on Wi-Fi technology dating from 2009 (The Telegraph).

A 2025 industry study ranked the UK 16th out of 18 major economies for onboard Wi-Fi speed, 1.09 Mbps on average, against Sweden’s 64.58 Mbps (BBC). One commuter interviewed for that piece said she now gets through about half the work she’d manage at her desk and has stopped planning video calls altogether because she can’t trust the connection to hold.

None of this is new, either. Over two decades ago, a study for the Greater London Authority quantified exactly this problem: 94% of employers said staff productivity was reduced, seriously or somewhat, by commuting difficulties. Three-quarters of employees said delays left them arriving at work stressed or tired (London.gov.uk).

One London-based banker summed it up better than any report could: “In Frankfurt the stress ends when you leave the office. Here, that’s when it starts.” Today, analysis of the current cost puts the productivity hit to UK business at around £820m a year (London Loves Business). Twenty years of studies, upgrades and headlines, and the diagnosis hasn’t moved. Only the invoice has got bigger.

Broken systems don’t announce themselves

Here’s the part that should make anyone running a business uncomfortable: none of this traces back to one villain. There’s no single signal failure, franchise, or software bug you can point at. It’s decades of infrastructure, franchising decisions and IT contracts stitched together, upgraded piecemeal, patched around outages instead of redesigned around how people actually need to travel and work now. Nobody sat down and decided commuters should stand for three hours with no signal. It happened one deferred maintenance call, one under-specced contract, one “we’ll sort that next year,” at a time.

That is exactly how broken systems take hold inside a business, too.

Nobody designs a workflow to lose leads between marketing and sales. Nobody builds an onboarding process that takes six weeks. But bolt a new tool onto an old process every year for a decade, without ever stepping back to redesign around the outcome you actually want, and you end up with a system that mostly works, that the whole team has quietly learned to route around, and that nobody owns fixing because no single part of it is “broken” on its own.

The GLA study found that in nearly a third of delay cases, employees didn’t even know the reason. Ask most teams why a deal stalled, why an invoice went out three weeks late, or why the same customer question keeps landing in three different inboxes, and you’ll get a similar shrug. The system produced the outcome. Nobody designed it to.

The fix isn’t another patch

The instinctive response to a delayed train is another app that tells you it’s delayed. There’s a genuinely useful upgrade under way, with satellite connectivity being rolled out across 1,400 trains over the next five years, aiming to lift Wi-Fi coverage from around 50–60% to over 90% (BBC). That’s worth doing. But it fixes the connection, not the capacity problem, the punctuality problem, or the reason nobody can tell you why your train was 21 minutes late in the first place. A faster notification about a broken system is not a fixed system.

Businesses have an advantage the railway doesn’t: they can actually redesign the whole thing, not just patch the visible symptom. That means mapping the workflow end to end, being honest about where it really breaks down rather than where it’s convenient to blame and rebuilding around the outcome rather than around whatever tool happens to be bolted on this year. It’s less exciting than buying new software. It’s also the only version of “fixed” that lasts.

London’s commuters will keep boarding delayed trains with patchy signals, because for most of them there’s no alternative route into the office. Most businesses running on the same kind of stitched-together, nobody’s-fault system have no such excuse.

Author Profile

Tania Benade-Meyer is the Founder and Director of mutherboard.com, a UK-based intelligent automation and monday.com Platinum Partner consultancy headquartered in Harrogate, England.

She has a strong focus on cutting through operational chaos: workflow automation, business process redesign, and helping growing organisations build a single source of truth across sales, project management, HR, and finance. Her work centres on understanding how work actually happens inside a business before recommending any technology, using platforms including monday.com and Make.com to remove manual admin and give leadership real visibility into where things break down.

Under her leadership, alongside co-founder Rob Meyer, mutherboard has grown into one of the UK’s leading monday.com consultancies, holding Platinum Partner status in the top 1% of partners globally, and has been named the UK’s Top Intelligent Automation Solution by CIO Review Europe and one of The Silicon Review’s 2026 Women Leaders to Watch. She also co-hosts mutherboard’s podcast, Dam It, Let’s Talk, unpacking the realities of business systems, AI adoption, and the chaos of modern work.