Intrenion

Pattern: Process overhang

Processes persist and consume effort long after their original purpose has expired.

In this condition, organizations continue to execute established procedures even after the original problem they addressed is no longer clearly present.
In this condition, employees allocate recurring time to approvals, documentation, or meetings whose current purpose is unclear to participants.
In this condition, process steps remain formally mandatory despite frequent informal exceptions in daily work.
In this condition, new controls and checkpoints are added to workflows without removing the corresponding older ones.
In this condition, reporting artifacts are produced on a fixed schedule regardless of changes in operational risk or relevance.
In this condition, frontline staff describe certain activities as legacy requirements that no one claims ownership of.
In this condition, cycle times and coordination overhead increase while the number of formal procedural steps continues to grow.

This occurs because no role is explicitly accountable for reviewing and terminating processes once their triggering conditions change.
This occurs because removing a control exposes decision-makers to blame if a rare failure later occurs, whereas keeping it in place carries little personal risk.
This occurs because compliance systems and digital workflows embed procedural steps that create technical and coordination switching costs.
This occurs because governance functions assess process adherence more consistently than the process’s continued relevance.
This occurs because authority to introduce new requirements is distributed across functions, while authority to eliminate them is ambiguous or centralized.
This occurs because downstream teams adapt their work to existing procedures, thereby increasing interdependencies and raising the cost of unilateral removal.
This occurs because institutional memory about the original rationale decays over time, reducing the likelihood that anyone can confidently declare the process obsolete.

Without a deliberate decision to remove or limit obsolete procedures, coordination overhead will continue to accumulate as new controls are layered on top of existing ones.
Without a decision clarifying the authority to sunset processes, responsibility for elimination will remain diffuse, and inertia will predominate.
Without a decision to realign measurement away from pure compliance, process adherence will continue to crowd out evaluation of current relevance.
Without a decision to absorb the political risk of removing controls, managers will default to retaining them, even as their utility declines.
Without a decision to constrain procedural growth, cycle times and administrative load will expand until they materially limit throughput and responsiveness.

We decide to complete only the minimum formally required steps in any legacy process because this gives us predictable time control in the presence of procedural overhang instead of voluntarily adding clarifications, extra documentation, or informal approvals beyond written requirements, and accept that stakeholders may perceive us as less collaborative or thorough.
We decide to decline participation in any new recurring meeting or reporting cycle unless a written mandate exists because this gives us protection against incremental process layering instead of informally agreeing to attend and shaping the process from within, and accept that we lose influence over how that process evolves.
We decide to document and publicly time-box our administrative work each week because this gives us a visible constraint that limits silent expansion of procedural tasks instead of absorbing additional process work without explicit allocation, and accept that some requested tasks will be deferred or visibly dropped.

I will complete only the formally required steps in legacy processes, and I will not add extra documentation or informal approvals beyond what is explicitly mandated.
I will not join any new recurring meeting or reporting cycle unless there is a written mandate requiring my participation.
I will publish and enforce a fixed weekly time limit for administrative work, and I will stop accepting additional process tasks once that limit is reached.