An Efficiency Fallacy

We've inherited a belief that there's one "best way" to do everything. But in a high-variance world, rigid processes are brittle. When we drive process adherence hard, often as a risk management tool, we're telling staff their judgement is a liability and their compliance is an asset. That's where decision friction takes hold: every judgement call now gets checked against the process rather than made on the spot, and every check adds delay. Worse, it creates a perverse incentive — staff get rewarded for following the procedure correctly, not for the outcome the customer actually got.

This is one specific version of a much bigger pattern — see why teams get bogged down for the fuller picture.

Picture a frontline staff member facing something the manual didn't quite anticipate — a slightly unusual request, a genuine edge case. The "efficient" system tells them: escalate, don't decide. So they wait. The customer waits. Nobody's done anything wrong, and nothing's moving.

Worse still, we end up with cognitive atrophy — trained incapacity, where judgement, confidence and problem-solving capacity quietly wither from disuse. A team drilled to follow steps correctly isn't the same as a team equipped to deliver results quickly, and the gap between the two only widens under pressure.

The alternative is what I call Adaptive Mastery — build people's core judgement and skill, set a clear outcome, then get out of their way. Remove the friction, and the perverse incentive goes with it, because there's no "correct process" left to optimise for instead of the customer.

Is your organisation's manual a roadmap, or a straitjacket?

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