A new leader finds a practice that makes no sense. A duplicated step, a report nobody reads, a supplier used for one category where a cheaper one exists, a committee with a member from outside the organization.
Removing it is quick, visible, and demonstrates that somebody is finally paying attention. Occasionally it is exactly right. Occasionally the cost appears fourteen months later somewhere nobody connects to the decision.
Why the reason is invisible
Practices that persist usually solved something. The reason is invisible for three ordinary reasons rather than because anybody concealed it.
The person who knew has gone, and the reasoning was never written down. This is the failure covered at length in the Written Communication subchapter, and this entry is where the bill for it arrives.
Or the practice is working, so the problem it prevents is not occurring, and a problem that is not occurring is invisible. The duplicated check catches something four times a year and nobody notices the four.
Or the reason is social rather than operational: the arrangement exists because it keeps a relationship functioning, and nobody was ever going to write that down.
Three questions before removing anything
Not a case for leaving everything alone. A case for a short enquiry that costs an afternoon.
Who introduced this, and can they be asked? Frequently somebody can. A retired employee will usually take a phone call and will remember exactly why, and that conversation is the cheapest information available anywhere in this subject.
What would happen if this failed? Ask the people who operate around it. They may not know why it exists and they generally know what it catches.
Does it correlate with something? A practice introduced the year after an incident, a lawsuit, an audit finding, or a near miss is almost certainly a response to it. The date is frequently the whole answer.
Suspend rather than remove
Where the enquiry produces nothing and the practice still looks pointless, the reversible version is available and almost nobody uses it.
Stop it for a defined period, tell people it is suspended rather than abolished, and name what you will watch. If the reason surfaces, it surfaces while restoration is trivial.
The difference matters because reinstating something you abolished is expensive in standing, and a leader who has spent that standing once will be reluctant to do it again, which means they will leave a bad decision in place rather than reverse it.
The categories most often load-bearing
Certain kinds of apparent inefficiency are disproportionately likely to be doing something.
Redundancy. Two people checking the same thing looks wasteful and is frequently the control that catches the error.
Slack. Unallocated time, spare capacity, a buffer in a schedule. Removing it improves utilisation and eliminates the organization’s ability to absorb anything unexpected. This is the most commonly removed and most reliably regretted.
Meetings that appear to accomplish nothing. Some are genuinely waste. Some are the only occasion two functions speak, and the coordination they produce is invisible precisely because it prevents problems rather than solving them.
An outside member on a committee. Almost always there because somebody once concluded the group needed a check on itself.
The new leader’s pressure
This error concentrates in the first year of a tenure, and the reason is situational rather than personal.
A new leader is expected to demonstrate that things are different. Removing an obvious inefficiency is fast, visible, and requires no cooperation. It is the most available way to show motion.
It is also the point at which the leader has the least knowledge of why anything exists. Maximum incentive to act, minimum information, which is a reliable formula.
The workable discipline is to spend the first months removing nothing while asking about everything, and to make the enquiry itself the visible activity. An organization watching a new leader ask why things are done this way is not concluding that nothing is happening.
The opposite error is also real
None of this argues for preserving everything, and an organization can be as damaged by reverence as by carelessness.
Practices genuinely outlive their reasons. The check exists because of a system replaced in 2014. The report goes to a committee dissolved four years ago. Nobody removes these because nobody is confident enough to, and the accumulated weight is a real cost paid daily.
What distinguishes the two situations is whether the enquiry was made. A leader who asked, found nothing, suspended it, watched, and then removed it has done the work. One who removed it because it looked inefficient has gambled, and will win most of the time and lose expensively.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD