Your Team's Junk Drawer: Why Process Without Context Creates Organizational Friction

 TL;DR: In 7 minutes, you'll learn how to identify which processes are organizational junk drawers and how to replace rigid checklists with clear context, so your team moves faster and delivers better results.

Research by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini found that the U.S. economy loses approximately $3 trillion annually (nearly 17% of GDP) due to excessive bureaucracy and process bloat. Your organization is likely contributing to that number without realizing it.

The problem is not that you have processes. The problem is you keep adding processes "just in case" without ever removing the ones that no longer serve you. Like a junk drawer filled with items you might need someday, your processes accumulate rules created for problems that happened once years ago and will never happen again.

The Seven-Dumpster Wake-Up Call

I learned this lesson the hard way when my manager decided our team needed a cleaner work environment. Once a quarter, we stopped everything and cleaned for a couple hours. It felt productive at the time. Organized space, organized mind, right?

One quarter, we decided to truly declutter our entire building. We spent two solid weeks getting rid of everything we did not actually use anymore. Old machines. Outdated chairs. Stacks of paper. CDs and floppy disks. Obsolete electronics. Books that had not been opened in a decade.

We filled seven 9-yard dumpsters. Seven.

But the resistance we encountered was remarkable. At every turn, someone was holding onto something with the same justification: "I am not sure if I will need that." "Let me go through that first." "I was saving this for X situation that might come up."

The moment that crystallized everything came when I found an engineer at their desk with a small trash can filled to the brim. Ten pounds of old thumb drives and circuit boards. They were methodically sifting through the pile, examining each piece, deciding what to keep.

I said what seemed obvious to me: "It is already in a trash can. Just throw it away."

Their response? "What if we get a field issue on one of those old games we released? What if we need one of these specific parts to test the problem or recreate the bug?"

Eventually, they threw it all away. We never needed any of it.

When I Finally Connected the Dots

Years passed before I realized what that decluttering exercise was really showing me.

Our organizational processes were exactly like the clutter in that building. A massive collection of everything we thought we might need to solve problems that may never come up again.

Take our test case library as a perfect example. It had grown into a collection of every single bug we had missed over 20 years of operations. Every scenario that appeared once. Every edge case from a single project that shipped in 2006 and has been obsolete for a decade.

We never went back and asked the critical questions: Can this specific problem still happen with our current technology? Does this particular rule still apply to how we work today?

We just kept adding. More test cases. More processes. More checklists. More rules layered on top of rules layered on top of rules.

The Hidden Cost of Process Without Context

Here is what research tells us about what happens when organizations operate this way.

A comprehensive study published in the Harvard Business Review calculated that 64% of organizations reported a Bureaucratic Mass Index (BMI) score of more than 70, indicating significant bureaucratic drag. Organizations with more than 5,000 employees averaged a BMI of 72, showing that process bloat scales with company size unless actively managed.

The research found that employees in bureaucratic organizations spend an average of 28% of their time (more than one full day every week) on bureaucratic activities like preparing reports, attending unnecessary meetings, complying with internal requests, securing sign-offs, and interacting with staff functions that add minimal value.

But here is what makes it worse: processes have a legitimate place in organizations. When they are minimal and deliberately paired with context about why they exist and what they accomplish, processes create valuable frameworks for consistency and quality.

The friction emerges when you create process without context. When you hand your team a checklist without explaining the underlying goals, constraints, and decision-making principles.

What Happens When Teams Only Have Checklists

Your team stops thinking critically and starts following steps mechanically.

They cannot adapt their approach when the actual situation does not match the predetermined checklist. They cannot make the contextually appropriate call for the specific problem they are facing right now. They escalate decisions to you because the process does not cover this particular scenario.

So what do you do? You add another rule to cover that new scenario. Which creates more friction the next time an even slightly different situation appears.

That organizational friction manifests everywhere. In how slowly your teams can deliver products to market. In how difficult it is for customers to work with you. In how many talented people leave because they feel like "cogs in a machine" rather than valued problem-solvers.

Even Amazon, one of the most operationally sophisticated companies in the world, recognized they had developed this problem. In 2024, CEO Andy Jassy launched a "bureaucracy mailbox." This was an internal tool allowing employees to flag inefficiencies, redundant rules, and approval bottlenecks that were slowing down the organization. If Amazon needs to actively fight process bloat at their scale, your organization almost certainly has room for improvement.

The Automated Testing Reality Check

I am watching this pattern play out in real-time right now with my QA team.

They are in the middle of rolling out an automated testing initiative, which is genuinely important work. But their instinct is to create comprehensive processes upfront to prevent every problem they think might possibly encounter down the road:

• Detailed documentation requirements that must exist before any test can be released
• Rigid specifications for how an automated test should be defined and structured
• Multi-layer approval processes that need to be completed before implementation

I keep redirecting them to a different approach: solve only the problems you actually encounter as they occur in practice. Create process only after you have enough completed work under your belt to understand what the general flow actually looks like in reality rather than theory.

Do not burden your team with elaborate rules designed for hypothetical situations that may never materialize. Instead, burden them with rich context about goals, constraints, and principles so they can handle actual situations effectively when those situations inevitably show up.

What Context Actually Looks Like in Practice

I wrote about this principle extensively in my previous post, "Stop Solving Your Team's Problems." Your fundamental job as a leader is not to provide your team with the answer to every question. Your job is to clarify desired outcomes, define realistic boundaries, and share relevant information that helps them make better decisions.

Providing context means ensuring your team genuinely understands:

• What you are ultimately trying to achieve (the specific outcomes that matter)
• Why it matters in the broader picture (how it connects to organizational success)
• What constraints actually exist (not assumed constraints, but real limitations)
• How to make effective trade-offs when real situations do not perfectly match any playbook

Context gives people clear boundaries to work within. Not a rigid predetermined path they must follow regardless of circumstances.

Costco has built their entire customer service reputation on this approach. They maintain a "Risk-Free 100% Satisfaction Guarantee" that allows customers to return most items at any time, with no receipt required because all purchases are linked to membership accounts.

That represents remarkably minimal process overhead. But here is what makes it actually work in practice: Costco gives their employees clear context rather than elaborate rulebooks. The overarching goal is straightforward. Customer satisfaction. Employees have genuine authority to make judgment calls in service of achieving that goal.

They do not need 47-page return policy manuals covering every conceivable edge case. They do not need to escalate to management for every slightly unusual situation. They understand the goal clearly. They make the call based on that understanding.

That is minimal process deliberately paired with maximum context. And it scales remarkably well.

Is Your Process a Junk Drawer? Four Diagnostic Questions

Here are four questions to help you identify which processes have become organizational junk drawers:

1. When was the last time this specific rule prevented the exact problem it was originally designed to solve?

If you cannot remember a recent instance, or if the answer requires going back multiple years, you might be maintaining a process that solves a problem that no longer exists in your current reality.

2. If we removed this process entirely tomorrow morning, what would actually break?

If the honest answer is "nothing would break" or "I genuinely do not know what would happen," you have almost certainly identified a junk drawer process that exists purely through organizational inertia.

3. Can the people actually following this process clearly explain WHY it exists?

If your team members know they must follow certain steps but cannot articulate the underlying purpose or the problem being prevented, that is a significant red flag indicating process without context.

4. Does this process solve a real constraint or an assumed constraint?

Most organizational processes are built on assumptions about what might potentially go wrong in hypothetical scenarios. Those underlying assumptions need to be explicitly tested against current reality rather than simply accepted as eternal truths.

What to Do Monday Morning

When your team approaches you with questions about policy or process, pause before responding.

Do not immediately answer with a rule from the handbook. Do not reflexively create a new checklist to cover this situation.

Instead, ask them a simple question: "Based on our goals and the outcomes we are trying to achieve, what makes sense in this specific situation?"

If they cannot answer that question effectively, share relevant information to help inform their decision-making. Provide context about constraints, priorities, trade-offs, and past learnings. Then ask again: "Given that additional context, what do you think is the best path forward today for this particular situation?"

This approach accomplishes two valuable things simultaneously.

First, it forces your team to engage in genuine thinking about the actual problem in front of them instead of simply searching for the predetermined rule to follow mechanically.

Second, it reveals precisely where your team needs additional context. If team members consistently get stuck making the same categories of decisions, that signals they do not yet understand the underlying goals, constraints, or principles well enough to operate effectively with appropriate autonomy.

Give them context and decision-making principles. Not another process to memorize.

Stop Adding to the Organizational Junk Drawer

Your processes are like that trash can full of obsolete thumb drives.

Filled with rules you added "just in case" to prevent problems that happened once years ago and will almost certainly never happen again under current conditions.

You never went back and systematically asked: Does this specific problem still exist in our current environment? Does this particular rule still serve us effectively given how we actually work today?

You just kept adding more layers. More rules. More checklists. More approvals. More friction.

Research from the London Business School estimates that reducing bureaucratic drag would add $3 trillion to economic output in the United States alone. That represents redeploying 21.4 million people from bureaucracy-feeding activities into genuine value-creating work.

The solution starts with one decision: stop reflexively adding to the junk drawer.

Start systematically giving your team the context, principles, and decision-making authority they need to think clearly for themselves.

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What process currently exists in your organization because of a problem that happened once, years ago, and probably will not happen again?

You are great at the work. Let's make you impossible to ignore.

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