The Hastings Inversion

Any organization with a growing process manual.

Run the Hastings Inversion this quarter: pull your complete process inventory. Every standing meeting, every approval chain, every review cycle, every sign-off requirement. For each, answer two questions. First: if everyone on this roster were excellent at their job, would we still need this process? If the answer is no, the process exists to compensate for someone's inadequacy. Second: who specifically is this process designed to catch? Name them. If the person has already left the company, you are running a process whose original justification departed years ago. The scar tissue remains. The specific implementation step most leaders skip: after identifying a process that exists for a person rather than a principle, remove it silently for one quarter and measure what happens. Do not announce the removal. Do not ask for permission. Just stop enforcing it and track the results. If nothing breaks, the process was insurance against a risk that no longer exists. If something breaks, you have identified an individual performance problem that was hiding behind a process, and now you can address the individual rather than taxing the entire team.

Post-acquisition integration.

The acquirer's processes will be experienced as insults by the target's best talent. Those are the people who will leave first, because excellent people have options and a low tolerance for bureaucracy they perceive as pointless. Before imposing any process on the acquired team, run it through the Hastings filter: "If everyone on this team were excellent, would we still need this?" If the answer is no, you are about to install a mediocrity tax on a team that was acquired precisely because it was not mediocre. The specific cost: every process you impose that the target's A-players consider beneath them accelerates their departure timeline by approximately the time it takes them to update their LinkedIn profile. That timeline is measured in weeks, not months.