Ever tried slicing into a lasagne that just won't cut?

You sink your fork in, but the layers refuse to break. You push, but the cheese sticks tight. Another jab, and the stuffing squirms out the sides. Suddenly, the knife slips, the plate skids, and all that red sauce splatters across your white shirt. What should have been dinner becomes a crime scene.

This is what bureaucracy tastes like.

When organisations get overbuilt, what should be simple turns into a battle. What should be nourishing becomes exhausting. Too many layers, too many steps, too much effort spent on what should be effortless — until the whole structure turns into an impenetrable mass.

It starts small

When we spot a problem at work, say a botched email or a lost client, our natural instinct is to create a process so that it doesn’t happen again.

At first, it works beautifully. We get exactly what we’d hoped for: order where there was chaos, direction where there was drift, and above all — that coveted sense of safety.

But then… another crack appears. So another fix follows. A form here, a sign-off there – just for peace of mind.

Layer upon layer, the cycle feeds on itself. Each process brings its own inefficiencies, which then needs another process to fix it. Each mistake spawns a new rule. Rules beget more rules, which bring more oversight, more governance, more process.

Meanwhile, the original problem gets buried under a pile of processes meant to fix problems caused by those very processes.

Before long, developers need three approvals and two meetings to push a one-line code fix. Sales loses deal after deal while pricing crawls through approvals. Managers spend their days tweaking dashboards while teams run in circles starved for direction.

It doesn’t stay small

If you see the world through process-coloured glasses, even these problems may look like process problems — bottlenecks waiting to be optimised, inefficiencies waiting to be automated.

But remove those glasses, and you’ll see a different picture.

You’ll see your social media manager do their part, but nothing more. No thoughtful pauses before a post. No extra touches to the tone. Because when every version needs a sign-off and every response needs a template, there’s just no room left for taste.

You'll see the slow surrender of your creative director. Once hired for thinking “outside-the-box”, she now sticks to the script and colours inside the lines. Not for lack of imagination, but because she’s tired of watching bold ideas suffocate in the process maze, while safe, incremental tweaks glide through the gauntlet.

Somewhere between "How do we solve this?" and "What process do we need to follow?", everything changes. The thinkers stop thinking. The darers stop daring. The carers stop caring.

At some invisible tipping point, people stop fighting bureaucracy and start internalising it. What starts out as preventative medicine turns into a crippling addiction to control.

All in the name of process.

Cues for action

If you feel your organisation buckling under the weight of too many processes, here's how to lighten the load:

Trade your rulebook for a compass

Look for places where a process can be replaced with a principle. Trust and autonomy are faster than any approval chain. If you need a sign-off on everything, the problem isn’t lack of process. It’s lack of trust, alignment, and clear guidance.

Ask:

• “If we had to replace this three-step process with one guiding principle, what would it be?”

• “If our team was truly living our values, which tasks would no longer need an approval?”

Treat your processes like you treat your people

Processes need career plans too. Give each process a defined role, set clear expectations, review their performance, and when it’s time, guide them to a graceful retirement.

• Ask: “Is this truly a process problem, or a symptom of something deeper? Do people feel lost because we lack documentation, or are they just cut off from the right conversations?”

• When reviewing an existing process, ask: “Is this process still doing what it was meant to do? Is still serving the people, or have people been serving it?”

Measure process bloat like you measure financial waste

Every process should face the same cost-benefit analysis as a major expense. A process may greatly improve efficiency by reducing errors, but these visible gains often come with hidden costs: delayed decisions, depleted energy, lost opportunities, and stunted innovation.

Ask:

• “If we had to assign a dollar value to the time, energy, and innovation this process costs us, would we still consider it a good investment?”

• “If we were founding this organisation today, which current processes would we deliberately choose not to implement?”

Remember, if you have to fight your food, it’s not good food. If you have to fight your process, it’s not a good process. And like a poorly made lasagne, more layers don’t always make it better. They just make it harder to swallow.