From "Permit A38" to Progress: cutting bureaucracy without losing control

A hands-on guide for leaders to identify bloated routines, simplify them radically and see measurable gains in decision speed and innovation capacity.

Oct 09, 2025

The bureaucracy trap or why “Permit A38” still feels familiar

Remember the scene from The Twelve Tasks of Asterix, where Asterix and Obelix are sent to get Permit A38, the mythical form that sends them through endless offices and counters until they lose their minds? It’s hilarious on screen. In real life, it’s just another Monday in many companies.

That scene wasn’t just comedy, it was prophecy. Every growing organization builds its own “The Place that Sends you Mad” processes that once brought order slowly mutate into obstacles. Rules designed to prevent chaos start to cause it.

Why this matters: bureaucracy kills speed (and energy)

There’s a simple truth most leaders learn the hard way: speed is a strategy, not just a delivery metric. The longer it takes to make a decision, the more likely it is to lose relevance or impact. In product development, that might mean being late to market. In operations, it could mean missed cost-saving opportunities. In customer experience, it means frustration.

But the damage goes deeper. Bureaucracy1 doesn’t just slow the system, it demoralizes the people in it. High-potential employees end up spending their time explaining their work instead of doing it. Meetings become about alignment rather than action. And instead of accountability, you get diffusion. Everyone’s consulted, but no one’s responsible.

According to Bain & Company, large organizations lose up to 30% of their productive capacity to what they call “organizational drag2”. That’s not inefficiency at the margins, it’s a full third of your firepower stuck in molasses.

The Mirage of the Perfect Process

At some point, every organization falls in love with the idea of the perfect process: one that catches every edge case, eliminates every risk and works for every scenario. It’s an appealing idea: order instead of chaos, certainty instead of surprises.

But in practice, chasing perfection leads to paralysis. Processes become bloated with approvals, exceptions and conditional logic. Teams spend more time updating each other than updating the customer. And the focus shifts from delivering outcomes to following procedures.

The irony is that most decisions aren’t that risky. Jeff Bezos famously distinguishes between one-way doors3 (hard to reverse, high stakes) and two-way doors (easy to undo, learn-as-you-go). Most internal decisions are two-way. They deserve speed, not ceremony.

Think like a highway, not a maze

Imagine your organization’s process landscape as a road network. In some companies, it’s a tangle of dead ends, detours and toll booths. But it doesn’t have to be.

Design your operations like a modern highway:

Fast lane4: A streamlined path for the most common 80% of cases. Few steps, few approvals, minimal friction.
Guardrail shoulder: An alternative route for exceptions, with basic criteria to ensure oversight without overkill.
Toll booths (approvals): Only at true risk points. Not every intersection needs a traffic light.

This approach doesn’t just simplify, it builds resilience. By focusing effort where it matters, you reduce the mental load on employees and allow them to operate with more clarity and speed.

Design from the outside in: what does the customer feel?

One of the most powerful reframing questions any team can ask is: how does this process feel to the customer? Not how it’s documented. Not what the SLA says. But what it’s actually like to go through it.

That’s where Customer Effort Score (CES)5 comes in. Instead of asking “Did we delight the customer?”, it asks “How easy was this to get done?” Why? Because research consistently shows that ease (not delight) is what drives loyalty.

To align internal processes with external experience, apply three tests to every step:

Does it deliver value faster?
Does it prevent a real customer-facing issue?
Does it reduce the effort required by the customer or frontline employee?

If a step fails all three, it probably exists for internal comfort and should be reconsidered.

Tool 1: Value Stream Mapping (VSM)

Value Stream Mapping6 is a way to visualize the full journey from request to delivery, not as it should work, but as it actually does. It reveals two powerful truths:

Most of your lead time7 isn’t spent doing the work, it’s spent waiting.
The biggest opportunities for speed gains lie in the handoffs and idle time.

How to do it (on a whiteboard):

Pick a concrete process (e.g., approving capital expenses over €10K).
Map out each step from start to finish.
Below each step, note:
- How long the step usually takes
- How often it gets stuck
- Who’s involved
- What the trigger is for moving to the next step
Add up total active time vs. total elapsed time.

Real-world example: A manufacturing firm maps its spare parts procurement process and finds:

3 steps of actual work: request, validate, order (total 1.5 hours)
7 days of average waiting time due to unclear roles, email chains and batch approvals
→ Lead time reduction potential: over 90% just by adding ownership and daily approvals.

Tool 2: Service Blueprinting

Where VSM looks at flow, Service Blueprinting8 looks at experience. It maps what customers or users see (frontstage) against what happens behind the scenes (backstage).

How to do it:

Draw a horizontal line: above it, customer actions; below it, internal steps.
For each visible action (e.g., “Submit support request”), map the backend steps that enable or respond to it.
Look for disconnects: where does internal complexity break the customer’s experience?

Real-world example: An industrial services provider maps their “field technician dispatch” process. Customers see a 3-day delay after ticket submission. Blueprinting reveals the cause: dispatchers wait for job codes from finance. Finance only processes requests twice per week. A simple daily batch fix reduces wait time from 3 days to 1.

Tool 3: Flow Metrics and Little’s Law

You don’t need to be a genius to understand flow. Just this one formula:

Lead Time = Work in Progress (WIP)9 ÷ Throughput10

What that means:

If a team has 40 items in progress and completes 10 per week → Lead time is 4 weeks.
Reduce WIP to 20 → Lead time drops to 2 weeks.

And you didn’t hire anyone new. That’s the power of limiting how much work is in flight.

Real-world example: A technical documentation team tracks 24 manuals in editing and averages 6 completions per week. Lead time = 4 weeks. They implement a WIP limit of 12. Output stays stable, but lead time drops to 2 weeks. Review fatigue also improves (fewer context switches).

Tool 4: Cost of Delay (CoD)

Cost of Delay (CoD)11 helps you prioritize which process to fix first. The formula is simple:

Value lost per week ÷ Effort to simplify

Example 1:

An internal pricing approval delays 2 quotes per day.
Each delayed quote reduces win probability by 15%, average margin per deal is €3,000.
Estimated value loss: €900 per day → ~€18,000/month.
A one-time simplification effort of 40 hours (~€3,200 cost).
→ CoD ratio: 5.6:1 → High priority.

Example 2:

Monthly vendor onboarding delays indirect procurement by 7 days.
Cost of delayed equipment = €250/day.
10 projects per month affected → €17,500/month lost.
Process can be simplified with two rule changes and one data integration.
Implementation cost: €5,000.
→ CoD ratio: 3.5:1 → Also high, but lower impact per euro than pricing process.

These examples make the value of simplification visible to finance, not just operations.

How to simplify (without breaking things)

You don’t need consultants or massive programs to reduce complexity: just a clear, disciplined loop that any team can run.

The Lean Simplification Loop (10 Steps)

Start with purpose
Ask: What outcome or risk does this process protect? If the answer’s unclear, cut it. Simplify anything that doesn’t protect real customer value or business risk.
Define the 80% path
Design a short, clean route for common cases. Handle exceptions with light guardrails, not committees. Use Value Stream Mapping (VSM) to visualize how work flows and Service Blueprinting to link internal steps with the customer experience. These tools reveal delays, rework and steps that serve no one but internal comfort.
Involve the doers
Talk to the people who live the process. Ask: What slows you down? What’s useful? What would you delete tomorrow? Their insights are the fastest way to find friction and fix it.
Use customer value as your compass
Every step should help the customer get results faster, more reliably or with less effort. If not, simplify or remove it. Research shows that reducing Customer Effort (CES) drives loyalty more than trying to “delight.”
Trust before control
Push decisions down. Assign one clear owner per step, with decision SLAs (e.g., “respond within 48h”). Save approval chains for high-stakes, one-way-door decisions. Fewer gatekeepers → faster flow → fewer mistakes.
Eliminate & simplify with ECRS
Apply the ECRS framework to every step:
- Eliminate: Can we cut it?
- Combine: Can we merge steps?
- Rearrange: Could the order be better?
- Simplify: Can we reduce effort?
Pilot the new path
Run a lean version with a small team. Measure impact on lead time, flow efficiency and CES. Keep changes that work. Only reintroduce complexity if risk or quality issues appear.
Measure what matters
Focus on real flow metrics:
- Lead time (request to delivery)
- Flow efficiency (work ÷ total time)
- Decision latency (avg. time to “yes/no”)
- CES (user effort)
Ignore vanity metrics like email volume or form completions. Use Cost of Delay to prioritize.
And cap Work in Progress (WIP), because Little’s Law guarantees: when WIP drops, lead time does too.
Make learning a habit
Simplification isn’t a one-time fix. Hold quarterly “kill a stupid rule” reviews. Start small and scale only what works. Celebrate deletions as real wins, because every rule you remove signals trust and clarity.
Scale & sustain
If the pilot works, document it in a one-page process charter. Share it. Use a shared Kanban board or spreadsheet to track lead time and decision SLAs. Keep the loop going: simplify → measure → learn → scale.

Timing: One simplification loop fits easily in one quarter:

2 weeks for mapping
2 weeks for redesign
4 weeks for piloting
2 weeks for evaluation

Team: 4–6 people (process owner, frontline doer, customer-facing role, compliance or risk). No external consultants needed.

What Lean Is Not

Not chaos, it’s clarity about what matters.
Not “faster approvals”, it’s fewer approvals.
Not a one-time cleanse, complexity always grows back. Plan to prune.

The 30-Day Pilot: no slide decks required

Week / Action

Choose a process everyone complains about. Clarify what it’s supposed to do.
Map it. Use VSM and Blueprinting with the actual people running it. Count steps and waits.
Redesign the 80% path. Cut waste. Assign ownership. Add WIP caps and decision SLAs.
Test the lean version. Track lead time, CES, error rates. Only reintroduce complexity if risk increases.

Create a One-Page Process Charter

Purpose: Customer outcome or risk the process protects.
Owner: Name, role, decision SLA (e.g., 48h).
80% Path: 3–5 clear steps.
Exception Path: Criteria, guardrails, escalation.
WIP Limit: Max items in progress.
Metrics: Lead time, handoffs, decision latency, flow efficiency, CES.
Risk Tiers: Low/Medium/High with thresholds and matching controls.

Final thoughts: simplification is a leadership act

Simplification isn’t about chaos. It’s about clarity. About knowing what matters and having the guts to cut what doesn’t.

Every unnecessary rule you remove sends a message to your team: We trust you to think. That’s how energy returns. That’s how speed becomes a habit. That’s how innovation scales.

Glossary

Bureaucracy: Rules, approvals and routines that aim to create order, but often end up slowing people down and creating friction.

Organizational Drag: The hidden cost of unclear decision rights, redundant processes and slow workflows.

Two-Way vs. One-Way Door Decisions
A decision-making concept from Jeff Bezos: Two-Way Door: Reversible → move fast, One-Way Door: Hard to reverse → decide carefully

Fast Lane: A simplified process path for the 80% of common, low-risk cases. Keeps flow fast without sacrificing control.

Customer Effort Score (CES): A metric that asks: “How easy was it for the customer to get what they needed?” Lower effort = higher loyalty. Simplicity beats delight.

Value Stream Mapping (VSM): A tool to map every step from request to delivery, including delays. Helps spot where time is leaking.

Lead Time: The total time from starting a task (like a request) to completing it (like delivery). Includes both working and waiting time.

Service Blueprinting: A visual tool showing what the user sees (frontstage) versus what happens internally (backstage). Great for exposing internal friction that affects experience.

Work in Progress (WIP): All tasks that have been started but not yet finished. High WIP stretches lead time and reduces focus.

Throughput: How much work a team completes in a given time: for example, 10 tasks per week.

Cost of Delay (CoD): A prioritization tool that shows which delays are most expensive. Formula: