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Today, we're going to do two things. Check if you're in it and then see how you might get out of it.
5 surface level signs you're in deeper level "Collabureaucracy"
...and need more than just a tent card with meeting rules on it:
- Lots of conversations but a constant struggle to get to decisions and action
- Teams missing milestones because people don’t have enough time between meetings for deep work
- People are exhausted from frustrating back-to-back meetings each day and constant pings from chat channels
- People struggling to collaborate across teams and feeling unclear and frustrated
- Frustrating interactions with colleagues in meetings are creating friction
Three yeses and I would say you're well into Collabureaucracy...
Let's look at each of them in turn and what we can do about them - a fix for people leading teams and a challenge to lay at your CEO's door.
(By the way, "Collabureaucracy - And How To Fix It IRL" is one of the core talks I'm giving in 2025, so if you'd like me to come and share it with your leadership team, just reply to this email and we can have a chat about what's might be most powerful.)
1. Under-deciding
Too many stakeholders, unclear ownership, and competing priorities mean bloated, slow decision-making.
Example: A product launch is delayed for weeks because no one knows who has the final say on pricing. Every meeting adds another layer of input, but no decisions are made.
What a team can do: Use frameworks like DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed) to clarify decision-making roles. Assign a clear owner for each decision and use deadlines for making the call. Sometimes, just a bit of structure makes all the difference.
What the CEO should do: Restructure decision-making authority across the organisation. Push decisions down to the lowest responsible level. Reduce the size of leadership teams or limit their decision-making scope to avoid bottlenecks. Make all this explicit. Lead it as a change.
2. Scattering
When everything’s a priority, resources stretch thin and teams burn out chasing multiple, conflicting goals.
Example: A marketing team juggles five campaigns in one month for five stakeholders who are all champing at the bit - they all go live late and none of them have a real impact.
What a team can do: Set a capacity limit e.g. 3 new campaigns per month. Tell all stakeholders they need to make their case for a slot. If one needs to swap in, ask what will swap out.
What the CEO should do: Understand the huge cost of adding another priority. Ruthlessly declutter objectives. Accept the pain of committing to less. Limit the organisation to three to five strategic objectives each year. Pause or cut projects that don’t align, even if they’re popular.
3. Switching
It’s not pivoting, it’s dragging a wrecking ball through teams, and the cost of reforming and re-establishing is high.
Example: An engineering team is halfway through developing a feature when leadership suddenly shifts focus to another project. Two months later, they’re asked to return to the original work, but they have to re-establish the old project which takes a lot of time - and everyone's motivation is low.
What a team can do: Define stabilisation windows for projects where focus is protected for a fixed period - only to be broken in an emergency situation. Communicate the full cost of switching clearly to leadership to encourage more thoughtful pivots. Encourage dialogue about the difference between agility and costly switching.
What the CEO should do: Set boundaries for strategic pivots. Commit to strategic plans for a set period (e.g., six months) and avoid major disruptions unless absolutely necessary. Build agility into team workflows so minor adjustments don’t derail progress.
4. Over-meeting
Deep work is squeezed because diaries are full of discussions and ‘every meeting needs everyone’.
Example: A project lead spends their week in back-to-back meetings and struggles to move any of their projects meaningfully forward.
What a team can do: Audit recurring meetings and cancel or consolidate those that aren’t critical. Use asynchronous updates for status reports and allow individuals to skip meetings where they aren’t essential contributors. Assign and clarity three roles: Critical (the meeting will be rearranged for these people), Appreciated (the meeting will not be rearranged for these people), FYI (not attending but can see all activity).
What the CEO should do: Hire me to reset the organisation’s meeting culture, of course! And lead by example.
5. Overlapping
The role/priority combination is poorly defined so talented people end up duplicating efforts, spending more time aligning than delivering.
Example: Two teams unknowingly work on the same initiative, but their outputs don’t align. A rushed effort to reconcile their work leaves both teams frustrated.
What a team can do: Share regular 'what we're doing' updates via email or Teams chat to surface overlaps as early as possible. Use the FYI function to include opposite numbers in other teams in meetings without them having to attend.
What the CEO should do: Sponsor an organisational realignment to reduce redundancies and clarify accountabilities. Invest in systems that give visibility across teams to prevent duplication like Maptio which is a dynamic and visual org/priority mapping tool (also organised by context, non-hierarchy - very cool).
6. Safe-playing
Fear of failure leads to safe, predictable solutions. Experimentation and innovation take a back seat.
Example: A team avoids experimenting with a bold new feature, and feels only safe enough to make to minor updates instead. Competitors, meanwhile, launch groundbreaking offerings and capture the market.
What a team can do: Carve out time and resources for experimentation. Use small-scale pilots to test bold ideas and frame up experiments clearly for senior people who might not fully embrace the principle.
What the CEO should do: Openly and explicitly encourage experimentation. Find ways to recognise it and the learnings that have come from it - rather than just sharing successes (i.e. experiments that succeeded).
7. Cluttering
Constant pings, emails and updates clutter attention, making it impossible to focus or discern what’s truly important.
Example: A project manager’s day is consumed by Slack notifications and email threads. By the end of the day, the five important things they planned to do remain not done.
What a team can do: Establish “quiet hours” for uninterrupted deep work. Set clear norms for communication channels such as including the full ask and level of urgency in a DM and including a title, concise post in a group channel and using the thumbs up emoji to indicate 'I've read it'. Push back on meetings (see also 4.) to drive out 20% more working time. Encourage people to set a status for the day on Teams (or similar), explaining their availability. Batch updates.
What the CEO should do: Introduce organisation-wide communication policies, such as response time windows and batching updates. Consolidate tools to reduce scattered attention and encourage asynchronous work for non-critical updates.
8. Frictioning
Formality, overly rigid processes, and too many approval loops add unnecessary friction.
Example: A new tool can't be used because IT have a slow and laborious process for reviewing and approving new software. IT eventually decide the tool can't be used and the team go back to square one.
What a team can do: Flag approval bottlenecks and propose streamlined alternatives. Use pre-defined guidelines to act autonomously on low-risk decisions.
What the CEO should do: Initiate a review and overhaul approval of processes across the organisation - with a rapid consultation to understand where the friction is. Consider a tool like InsightGenie to gather and analyse friction points within 24 hours, not 24 weeks.
9. Blocking
Even when small innovations succeed, linear thinking and bureaucratic systems block the path to scaling them.
Example: A team pilots a cost-saving process improvement, but it stalls when they can’t get buy-in from other departments to adopt it.
What a team can do: Create a roadmap for scaling successful pilots and get early support from power-people. Be willing to create a mini-movement and be a trend-setter. It's a theme across this whole newsletter!
What the CEO should do: Back to the overhaul of thinking about, reviewing and approving stuff that matters. And back to InsightGenie. If you haven't talked to its creator, Anthony Lawton, you should.
Collabureaucracy can be addressed and somewhat dismantled - but you need to act. Teams can tackle the symptoms locally, and of course systemic change starts with bold decisions at the top. CEOs who tackle the above 👆 will see their organisations regain speed and focus.
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