The Trap
Too many people throw around terms like 10x developer or 100x team. I want to talk with you about the -100x team.
Most executives shouldn’t hope for 100x teams. Most enterprises simply don’t have the necessary DNA. Imagine a fish trying to climb a tree. Instead, most organizations would reap the greatest gains if they’d simply try to not suck. I’m talking about organizations so encumbered by bureaucracy that they literally suck the spirit out of their employees. The human toll of bureaucracy is so costly and demoralizing that it’s, in some cases, a moral tragedy as well as an economic catastrophe.
It’s not malice that produces bureaucracy; it’s the desire for structure and pattern; and fixing it is simpler than it seems.
It begins with understanding Parkinson’s Law. C.N. Parkinson wrote in a 1955 essay:
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
— C.N. Parkinson
That’s the part most people remember and quote. But Parkinson’s essay wasn’t only about time management, it was a semi-humorous commentary about the inefficiency of administrative functions in a bureaucratic organization. There’s some truth in every great joke, and Parkinson coined the term “coefficient of inefficiency” to describe the phenomenon whereby the size at which a committee or other decision-making body becomes completely inefficient. So, the lesser-known feature of Parkinson’s Law goes like this:
The number of workers within administration tends to grow, regardless of the amount of work to be done.
— C.N. Parkinson (“Parkinson’s Law” The Economist, 19 November 1955.)
While a little bureaucracy is necessary and valuable, even a little goes a long way toward limiting transparency and communication. The crucial variables to achieve high-quality decision-making. Because bureaucracy has key features:
- It divides people. (RACI charts, departmentalization, etc.)
- It grows. (Parkinson’s Law.)
The result: even a little bureaucracy, left unchecked, quickly becomes unwieldy and all-consuming.
The Patterns We All See
I frequently host Scrum and Kanban training courses for highly bureaucratic organizations, and I visit and consult with my executive clients. My heart truly goes out to those people stuck in an environment that is impossibly dysfunctional. In such dysfunction, the natural inclination for every individual is to cling to any little control they have. The results include an ever-expanding, divisive org chart, and an ever-tightening grip on the work.
The patterns are not isolated. They are systemic and lead to wasted effort and morale drain. I wish I were exaggerating. I’m not:
- I’ve been witness to 10 weeks of effort among 30 people to change the shade of a loader/spinner icon! This was a change a programmer can make in 14 seconds but required the approval of a Senior Director through 6 layers of management.
- I met a talented designer who had just quit his job in Silicon Valley because he worked for 10 months on beautiful designs to modernize the UI of a popular SaaS but not a single design reached the end users. Every design he proudly proposed was shelved by senior product managers; and not because they didn’t love his designs, but because the technical directors of the product were trying to gain favour with an external design agency. This man was, unfortunately, collateral damage in a budgetary competition between executives.
- I wrote an entire book about the bureaucratic catastrophe known as Phoenix Payroll: an initiative in Canada’s federal government that started as a $5.7 million proposal and ballooned to more than $5 billion.
- In the US public school system, bureaucratic administrative functions grew 87.6% from 2000–2019 while the student body and teaching staff grew at less than 10% of that rate.
Why This Happens
Parkinson estimated bureaucracy grows between 5–7% annually. People think they’re just adding a little structure, they’re just introducing a new check and balance. All bureaucratic bloat starts small, well-intended. Soon, everyone feels caged and stifled.
- “Just submit a Pull Request” — Developers agree that peer review is helpful but they decide against the most effective option (e.g. sitting together briefly) because they are persuaded that asynchronous reviews are more efficient. 14 minutes becomes four days.
- “Update the job description” — You slip “participate in cross-functional governance forums” into every developer’s job description. Suddenly they’re in three extra weekly meetings they never asked for.
- “Hey, with AI we can get automatic transcriptions of meetings” — Somewhere down the line, those recordings require secure cloud storage, security and privacy policies, and entire departments to audit the chain of custody of those transcriptions.
- “Consult with Legal” gets written into a Confluence page while managers are discussing one specific problem. Harmless, right? A year later, every tiny UI tweak now waits on Legal’s calendar. Nobody questions it.
- “Feature Request Form” — What used to be a Slack message and a conversation is now a form with 14 mandatory fields, followed by three iterations of estimation, architectural review, and feasibility study.
- “We should have a weekly sync” — A 30-minute “alignment meeting” between two teams is added to the calendar. They already talk daily. Attendance becomes mandatory.
- “Include success metrics” — Job descriptions now require every task to have “measurable KPIs.” Developers spend more time writing success criteria than shipping product.
- “Let’s circle back after the meeting” — You develop a habit of saying, “I’ll send a summary email for confirmation” and every decision now needs written ratification.
You see, these aren’t big, dramatic decisions. They are simple additions made by well-meaning, responsible individuals.
Every straw on the camel’s back is just one straw. But some of the people I meet in my Scrum and Kanban classes are carrying so much load and facing so many barriers, it’s difficult not to feel the gravity of their circumstance.
The Simple Fix — Recompose and Set Free
The remedy begins with making new choices and being vigilant. The following ideas can be implemented today.
Delete one recurring meeting this week.
Pick the worst one. Pick the one with the most invitees. No replacement. Chances are good that everyone already hates the meeting. You’ve probably noticed that most invitees rarely attend. Remove it from the calendar with a quick message like, “May rethink this meeting in future.”
Expect one person to contact you to challenge the decision. He/she will explain how important the meeting is/was. Ask him/her about that; ask what they found valuable about the meeting then brainstorm other ways they can receive the info/value they became accustomed to. Be reminded that just because they became accustomed to it that it’s necessary to continue.
Kill every approval gate that isn’t legally required.
If it’s not a regulatory checkbox, remove it. And if it’s an audit process, talk to the auditors to simplify the workflow.
Audit your org chart today.
Decide on a stringent doer-to-administrator ratio. You already know the ratio is broken. Reassign the surplus administrators back into doer roles. (They probably became managers because that was the only ladder to a higher salary. Many would enjoy returning to their craft and get paid for the value they produce.)
Meeting minutes are waste.
Record and communicate decisions only.
Let every developer talk directly to end users.
No proxies, no requirements docs. It’s the only way for developers to truly understand the end users and produce a solution that is fit-for-purpose. The amount of information they need from others in the enterprise is surprisingly little. Most artifacts produced by others are ignored by developers — not because they’re malicious or lazy, but because those artifacts convey information not understanding, not empathy for the end user.
Form one 5-person cross-functional team tomorrow.
Give it real ownership of an important mandate and zero oversight for 30 days.
Reassign every “coordinator” “governance lead” “facilitator” to actual delivery work.
Their current job is mostly attending other people’s meetings.
Burn all the RACI charts.
Replace them with “the team that owns it decides”. And make compensation, and upward mobility, transparent. Most RACI discussions are initiated by someone trying to figure out if they’re paid enough, or less, or more than someone else doing similar work.
After the initial learning curve of self-organization, decision speed will shock you.
Cap every meeting at 7 people.
More than that? Split it or cancel it. Large Zoom meetings are mostly theater and enable disengagement.
Replace all status reports with a single visible board.
The board should be flexible, unstructured, and easily modified — like a whiteboard. If reports require effort, you’re tracking the wrong information or communicating it the wrong way.
Sunset one “shared-service” silo completely. Then another.
Look across your organization for same-skilled groups led by a manager with that skill (e.g., QA group, QA Manager). Ask each of them which product they’d like to focus on in their work, assign them 100% to that product team. Invite that service manager to rejoin the delivery work and share their skill as a mentor, not a manager.
Watch hand-offs shrink from days to minutes.
Your Next Step – Gentle but Firm
Steer away from rhetoric like “transformation” and top-down reorg. Ask people how they’d like to change the way they contribute. Emphasize the value of small, cross-functional team units. Optimism and invitation are the best way through. Relieving bureaucracy is a pain-reliever. People want pain relief more than they want status quo.