Gary Hamel on Busting Bureaucracy

with Gary Hamel

Busting Bureaucracy Team Tool

Overview
An excess of bureaucracy makes our organizations bloated, slow, insular, rigid, stifling, timid, callous,
and factious. The label we use for this bundle of afflictions is “bureausclerosis.” While common,
bureausclerosis is not inevitable. Organizations like Nucor Steel, W.L. Gore, Morning Star, Svenska
Handelsbanken AB, and others have proven that it’s possible to run large, complex organizations with little
or no bureaucracy.

In this exercise, designed for a group of 8–12 individuals, you will have the chance to “hack” the
management model in your company. Specifically, you will…

1. Identify the symptoms of bureausclerosis that are the most costly and debilitating for your
organization.
2. Identify the elements of your organization’s management model (beliefs and behaviors, roles and
structures, and systems and processes) that contribute to bureausclerosis.
3. Brainstorm “management hacks” that might help to reduce the effects of bureausclerosis.
4. Turn the best of those hacks into small-scale experiments that you can run within your team,
department, or business unit.

There is a worksheet for each of these tasks. The elapsed time for this exercise is 4 hours.

Setup
For this exercise, you will want to find a quiet room with one or two large tables. If possible, print out
the worksheets in a large format—roughly 60 x 100 cm. I find it’s easiest to have the participants sit or
stand around a worksheet that’s been laid out on a table. Make sure each participant has a pad of sticky
notes and a black marker pen. You’ll also need a way of attaching the worksheets to a wall as each one is
completed.

Worksheet 1
0:00 - 0:05 As an individual, review the list of eight symptoms of bureausclerosis. Pick the two you think
are most costly or debilitating for your organization. Using your marker pen, place a tick
mark in the two corresponding boxes in the right column.

0:05 - 0:20 Go around the group and give each individual a minute or two to explain why they chose
the symptoms they did.

0:20 - 0:25 As a team, review the voting for the symptoms and identify the one bureaucratic affliction
your team would most like to tackle.

Gary Hamel on Busting Bureaucracy with Gary Hamel

1 of 4
Worksheet 2
0:25 - 0:40 (In the upper right-hand corner of Worksheet 2, write down the name of the symptom
you’re going to tackle.) Now it’s time to “dimensionalize” the negative impact of this
bureaucratic infirmity. As an individual, reflect on the ways in which this particular aspect of
bureausclerosis (a) reduces the productivity of your organization, (b) impairs its capacity to
innovate, (c) impedes proactive change, (d) undermines employee engagement, and/or (e)
interferes with delivering a great customer experience.

For example, if your team decided to focus on “stifling,” you may believe that a lack of
autonomy for front-line employees (1) discourages them from contributing new ideas (thus
limiting innovation), (2) makes it difficult for them to launch local change initiatives (thus
undermining agility), (3) undermines employee loyalty (thus reducing engagement), and
(4) limits their freedom to creatively solve customer problems (thus reducing customer
satisfaction).

As you reflect on the particular affliction your team has chosen to tackle, write down each of
the various ways in which it negatively impacts organizational performance. As you complete
each sticky note, post it in the appropriate place in Column 1 of Worksheet 2. (Be as specific
as possible.) Try to generate 4–6 examples of how this particular bureaucratic infirmity
undermines organizational performance. Once members have posted their notes on the
worksheet, move onto the next task.

0:40 - 1:10 Go around the group and have participants share their comments. Ask questions for clarity.
Once the team has reviewed all the notes, spend a few minutes thinking about financial
implications this particular aspect of bureausclerosis has on your organization. These
calculations will be very rough, but it’s important to begin to translate the costs of excess
bureaucracy into dollars and cents. It’s OK to make rough assumptions here, as you’re
merely trying to come up with order-of-magnitude costs.

1:10 - 1:20 As a group, try to identify a few anecdotes (real-life stories from your organization) that
illustrate how this particular bureaucratic affliction undermines organizational performance.
Summarize each anecdote in a sentence and record it in the appropriate place on
Worksheet 2.

1:20 - 1:40 The next task is to understand how the management systems and practices in your
organization contribute to bureausclerosis. Working as individuals, try to identify the specific
things that give rise to the infirmity you’re focusing on.

For example, if you’re trying to identify exactly what makes bureaucracy “stifling,” you might
create a sticky notes that says “Managers don’t believe employees can be trusted to do the
right thing,” or “We have a very narrow span of control that makes it difficult for individuals
to learn how to be self-managing,” or “We don’t have a way of recognizing and rewarding
first-level employees who take initiative.”

You have to dig deep. What is it, exactly, about your beliefs, structures, and systems that

Gary Hamel on Busting Bureaucracy with Gary Hamel

2 of 4
 contributes to bureausclerosis? Try to identify 5–10 underlying causes, and then post each of
your sticky notes in the appropriate space in the right-most column of Worksheet 2.

1:40 - 2:00 Go around the group and ask participants to read out the notes they just posted. (As you do
this, group similar notes together). Once you’ve finished reviewing the notes, ask yourself,
“Which of these things plays the biggest role in making our organization more bureaucratic
than it needs to be?” Take a marker pen and circle the sticky note(s) that correspond to
the two or three things that make the biggest contributions to bureausclerosis. In the next
exercise, you’re going to brainstorm ways of excising these things from your organization.

Mount Worksheet 2 on the wall.

2.00 - 2.15 BREAK

Worksheet 3
2:15 - 2:45 (Write the name of the bureaucratic affliction in the upper right-hand box on Worksheet 3.)
Now it’s time get creative. As an individual, refer back to Worksheet 3 and the root causes
that your team identified. If the goal is to eliminate or counteract these root causes, what
changes would you make to your organization’s management model? For example, if you’re
working to make your organization less “stifling,” you might suggest (a) letting frontline
team members interview and hire their colleagues (versus having this done by a supervisor
or an HR specialist), (b) creating detailed P&Ls for frontline teams to help them think and
behave like business owners, or (3) creating a daily forum where employees can gather
into small teams and problem solve key issues (rather than referring these problems to a
supervisor).

Try to generate 5–10 ideas for busting bureaucracy that are relevant to the particular
symptom you’re focusing on. Post each remedy on a sticky note and place the notes in the
relevant spaces within the first column of Worksheet 3.

2:45 - 3.15 Go around the team and ask individuals to share their ideas for busting bureaucracy. Ask
questions for clarification. Group similar ideas together on the worksheet and put a circle
around closely related ideas. When you are finished, ask each person to vote for their top
three remedies by placing a large tick mark on the relevant sticky notes.

Once everyone has voted, identify the three remedies that received the most votes and give
each one a name or a headline. Enter these in the appropriate spaces in the second column
of Worksheet 3.

Before going on to the next task, it’s a good idea to pressure test your proposed remedies.
For each one, ask, “If this were successfully implemented across the organization, what sort
of impact would it have?” In other words, would this remedy make a significant difference in
rolling back bureaucracy? If you struggle to answer this question, go back and look at the list
of remedies you generated and see if there’s one that might make a bigger difference.

Gary Hamel on Busting Bureaucracy with Gary Hamel

3 of 4
 Mount Worksheet 3 on the wall.

Worksheet 4
3.15 - 4.00 A great idea is worth nothing until someone puts it into practice. In this exercise, you’re
going to start thinking about how you might launch a low-risk, small-scale experiment to
test whether your bureaucracy-busting idea will actually work. Remember: No one’s going to
give you permission to dynamite long-standing management structures and systems, so you
need to design experiments that can be run with a minimum of investment and disruption.

In the time allotted here, you’ll begin to sketch out one experiment. If you want to develop
more, you’ll need to extend the timeline accordingly.

Go back to Worksheet 3. As a team, choose the one idea/remedy you’d like to experiment
with first. Enter the name at the top of Column 1 on Worksheet 4.

Now think about how you’d make your idea work in practice. What data, tools, skills,
technologies, structures, systems, and support would be required? List each of the critical
components of a workable solution in the appropriate space in Column 1.

Now step back. As you were discussing your proposed remedy, what assumptions were you
making? It’s important to be explicit about your make-or-break assumptions, and to design
the experiment to test those assumptions. In the appropriate space in Column 1, note the
critical assumptions you’re making about human behavior, required resources, presumed
benefits, and other critical factors.

Next, you need metrics to assess the outcome of any experiment. Ideally, you’ll generate
before and after measures and/or measures that allow you to compare what happened with
your experimental group versus a “control” group elsewhere in the organization. These
measures can be qualitative (e.g., opinions) or quantitative. In any case, it’s important to
think through the sorts of measures you’ll use to assess the impact of your experiment. Note
these in the space provided.

Finally, what are the next steps? What can you do in the next 10 days to push forward the
design of your experiment? And following that, what will you need to do to launch your
experiment in the next 30 days? Here’s where you’ll need to answer the important questions
about who, what, how, and when. Identify key tasks, assign responsibilities, and set
deadlines in the space provided at the bottom of Worksheet 4.

And remember: Innovation is an iterative process of design-test-learn-recalibrate. Don’t

be discouraged if your first experiment doesn’t produce the results you hope for. If that
happens, use what you’ve learned to design a follow-up. Bureaucracy busters need to be
creative, but they also need to be persistent!

Gary Hamel on Busting Bureaucracy with Gary Hamel

4 of 4