Red Tape is Double-Sided: How to Cut Through Bureaucracy & Indecision to Get Things Done

There are a lot of benefits to being in the business of human-centered design, but topping the list is it makes you a better human, at least in my opinion. Your brain is set to problem-solve and innovate quickly, keeping the only real constant — change — in motion.

This is one of the reasons why I love it when my clients run problems by me that seemingly have nothing to do with a project at hand. Of course, inevitably they’re connected: logjams block productivity at all points.

Take, for example, an executive of a Fortune 500 company who recently vented to me about how he desperately needed to reorganize his department, but his boss had him bound up in red tape. After a quick back-and-forth using the classic “5 Whys” exercise, we got to the root cause of the boss’s problem — fear of being fired for rocking the boat.

To me, this scenario is like death by a thousand cuts. If you consider each workday a nightmare (this applied to both my client and his boss), then it all adds up to a crushingly insufferable existence.

And the truth is it’s all mindset. So, as I told my client, instead of thinking negatively like death by a thousand little cuts, how about thinking positively about innovation by a thousand micro-actions…