I met a Malawian, a gatekeeper at a game reserve there, who was mauled during a lion attack. His face is terribly scarred and he’s missing an ear; but he’s alive.
That got me thinking about you. It’s likely you’ve been mauled too. Not by a lion, but by something more powerful and pervasive: Bureaucracy. And you’ve got the scars to prove it; yet somehow you’ve made it through.
Bureaucracy is the mother-of-all legacy systems. It directs what you do and how you do it. And if you want to overturn it, or simply change it a little, or arrest its operation for just one team, it won’t let you. I’ll bet it’s the single biggest impediment to your agile ambitions. But you’re correct to want to change it, because these days bureaucracy is not the best organizing principle we can think of. [click to continue…]
