Unnecessary layers of process are added until routine work cannot be finished without a small group of experts loyal to the sponsor, who also decide how the new rules are read.
An example
Project directors at an engineering services firm used to sign off their own design packages after a peer check. Three months after a new chief technology officer arrived, a technical governance office staffed by his former colleagues introduced a forty-page design-assurance template, a review board, and a list of certified reviewers drawn entirely from that office. A bridge rehabilitation package that one project director would once have closed in a week took seven, returned twice as incomplete because the old calculation sheets did not fit the new forms. Directors who routed through a certified reviewer got pre-filled templates and approvals in days. At a client steering meeting, the director was asked why the schedule had slipped. Afterward the director gathered the review standards of two peer firms and of the client's own engineers, each a single sign-off, and sent them to the managing director.
Why it works
Routing work through the experts looks easier, because they pre-fill templates, know the workarounds, and waive for their own clients the friction they created for everyone else. Working independently looks worse, since established methods suddenly read as noncompliant, and costlier, because each attempt brings stalled approvals and rework that look like the requester's incompetence. It holds when the people who design the complexity also certify who may interpret it, leadership treats template compliance as performance, no outside process can be cited as simpler, and the expert group stays small and loyal.
The thinking behind it
Oliver E. Williamson Williamson's The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (1985) describes asset specificity: investments specialized to one relationship lose value outside it, so the parties come to depend on each other. Knowing how to pass the new design-assurance gates is a specific asset held by the certified reviewers, and every team that needs it depends on them. Publishing the logic behind the rules makes the knowledge general and dissolves the dependence.
Herbert A. Simon In Administrative Behavior (1947), Simon showed that individual decisions are shaped by premises the organization supplies, procedures among them. Whoever writes the procedures, and whoever certifies how they are read, controls the decisions made from them. That is why separating authorship from interpretation is the structural defense here, and why arguing case by case with the interpreters rarely works.
Warning signs
Routine filings require sign-off from a named group, where peer organizations finish the same work in one step. New templates, methodologies, and approval gates arrived close together, alongside new appointments to the roles that interpret them. Work that passed last year now comes back marked incomplete. Requests routed through the experts move fast and the rest stall. Leadership starts asking why the independent teams are slow.
How to defend yourself
- Gather evidence that the complexity adds nothing: the simpler processes of peer organizations, auditors, or clients that meet the same standard.
- Log every rework cycle with dates, so the delay shows up as a property of the process.
- Ask, in writing, what substantive risk each added step addresses.
Take the evidence to someone who can break the link between writing the rules and interpreting them: a new leader, an outside auditor, or a consultant asked to review the process. Publishing the underlying logic of the rules ends the group's monopoly faster than arguing case by case. Routing everything through the experts to save time only confirms the arrangement.
How a leader shuts it down
Separate the people who write a process from the people who interpret it, and publish the logic behind every new gate. Benchmark processes against peer organizations and auditors, and ask what each layer adds beyond gatekeeping. Stop treating template compliance as a proxy for performance.