When efficiency becomes ceremony — and how to get back to real progress
Some projects start with the promise of making things simpler — of finally cutting through the friction and creating a smoother, more efficient way of working.
And yet, too often, those same projects end up doing the opposite: adding layers of governance, tools, and approvals that turn progress into a ritual.
Over the years, I’ve seen this pattern repeat itself.
It doesn’t start with bad intentions.
It starts with ambition — the ambition to make things work better, scale faster, connect people and processes under a single vision.
But somewhere along the way, that ambition gets lost in translation, replaced by a focus on method over meaning.
The global project that never saw the light
A few years ago, I was part of a global rollout meant to transform how an organization managed its audience engagement — from content planning to internal approvals, across markets and business units.
The goal was clear: unify the way the company engaged with its audiences, simplify how materials were created , approved, and used by the organization to gain visibility on performance.
On paper, it was a beautiful plan — one system, one way forward.
But as the rollout began, so did the friction.
Each new market came with its own context, constraints, and workflows.
The new system — conceived to bring coherence — instead started to slow people down.
Meetings multiplied, approvals piled up, and the formal process of being efficient began to consume the very time it was supposed to save.
The more alignment we sought, the more fragmented the work became.
And despite all the effort, the project struggled and pivoted few times.
Just an example of how complexity can quietly replace progress when transformation is imposed top-down.
The lighthouse project that actually worked
Not long after, I was involved in a smaller initiative — one that, on the surface, seemed far less ambitious.
Instead of redesigning the entire engagement model, we focused on a single bottleneck: the approval process.
It was a lighthouse project — a pilot designed not to prove a point, but to learn from experience.
We started small.
We mapped how the process really worked, identified where delays happened, and tested a lighter, iterative approach — adjusting in real time.
Within a few weeks, the impact was visible: approvals moved faster, feedback loops shortened, and teams felt empowered to make decisions again.
No big rollout, no massive reorganization — just thoughtful simplification where it mattered.
That project taught me something fundamental:
Transformation doesn’t always require revolution.
Sometimes it just needs focus — the discipline to improve one thing at a time, learn from it, and scale only what works.
Change built from the ground up tends to last longer than change pushed from the top down.
The hidden cost of “work about work”
Out of curiosity — and perhaps frustration — I started to look into how much time organizations really lose to this kind of friction.
The numbers surprised me.
📊 According to Asana’s Anatomy of Work report, knowledge workers spend 60% of their time on “work about work” — coordination, meetings, and searching for information.
Harvard data shows that managers spend 23 hours a week in meetings, and 71% of those are considered unproductive.
That alone costs U.S. companies an estimated $37 billion a year.
And the so-called toggle tax — the mental cost of switching between tools and tasks — drains up to 40% of real productivity, with employees toggling between apps hundreds of times a day.
So while we often talk about innovation as a way to move faster, we might first need to ask:
Are we innovating the right things?
Simplification is a strategy
The irony is that simplifying often feels less ambitious than transforming.
It’s quieter, less visible, and harder to present on a roadmap.
But it’s also where the real progress happens.
Simplification isn’t about removing complexity altogether — it’s about removing the wrong kind of complexity.
It’s not about having fewer tools, but about having the right ones that reduce friction instead of adding to it.
It’s not about doing less, but about doing only what truly moves the work forward.
For large global organizations, inefficiency is a cost that can be absorbed.
For small and mid-sized companies, it can be the difference between growth and stagnation.
That’s why clarity and adaptability — not scale — are often the most underrated forms of innovation.
Three signs you’re performing “Agile theater”
1️⃣ Complexity increases, but perceived value doesn’t.
Every new process or tool is meant to improve something. But if the people doing the work don’t experience a benefit, complexity becomes a cost.
2️⃣ Meetings multiply, but decisions don’t.
When meetings exist to align rather than to decide, the process is already broken.
3️⃣ Tools replace conversations.
If collaboration requires another platform just to discuss a problem, efficiency is already lost.
“We don’t need bigger projects — we need smarter processes.”
In the end, that’s the lesson I keep coming back to.
The success of a project rarely depends on how sophisticated its framework is, but on how intelligently it adapts to reality.
Simplification isn’t the opposite of innovation — it’s the foundation that makes innovation possible.
Simplicity isn’t lightness — it’s precision on what truly matters.
