Why we chose to start from scratch

A company does not become bureaucratic because someone decides one day that it should be. It usually becomes bureaucratic for good reasons.

An approval is added to reduce a risk. A meeting, to share information better. An indicator, to understand what is going on. A coordinator, because several people need coordinating. A detailed schedule, to give visibility. A procedure, to keep a mistake from happening again.

Taken separately, each of these choices looks reasonable. That is precisely what makes the problem interesting.

Reasonable decisions, an absurd system

An organisation can accumulate locally rational decisions for years and end up producing a globally absurd system. No one really knows any more why certain rules exist. Processes created to make work easier start to slow it down. Tools meant to give visibility demand more data entry than the work they are supposed to represent. A simple decision crosses several layers of approval because everyone is legitimately trying to protect themselves.

In the end, no one has necessarily done their job badly. And yet the system works badly.

People who have already spent a few years in a large organisation will probably recognise some of these situations. Those just entering their professional life may discover them later. We would rather they never have to consider them inevitable.

The question we start from

This is why we chose to start again from a very simple question:

What problem are we actually trying to solve?

Not: which method is fashionable? Not: what do the companies in our sector do? Nor: which tool are we going to buy?

We first try to understand the problem. Only then do we choose the mechanism that seems to answer it best.

The distinction sounds obvious. It is much less so once a company grows. Over time, mechanisms easily become habits. Habits become rules. And rules end up outliving the problem that once justified them.

We want to avoid that evolution as much as possible. This means treating no practice as sacred. Our working methods, the way we decide, our management system and even what you are reading right now must remain open to challenge when the facts show they no longer work.

Starting from scratch is not removing structure

We are not looking for the company without rules, nor for the perfectly flat organisation where everyone does as they please. Those models often displace power rather than remove it. When no one officially knows who decides, decisions do not disappear. They simply become harder to understand and harder to contest.

We do the opposite: visible responsibilities, written rules, attributed decisions and mechanisms anyone can question.

Trust, without naivety

Trust plays a central role here.

In many organisations, a lack of trust is gradually compensated with control. More monitoring. More status reports. More approvals. Behaviour is made predictable by narrowing everyone’s room for manoeuvre.

That sometimes works in the short term. But by gradually taking away people’s ability to decide, you also take away part of their responsibility.

We want to try the other direction. Give each person enough freedom to genuinely take charge of an outcome. Make commitments visible enough that this freedom never turns into opacity. Build a system where a mistake can be acknowledged and corrected without first looking for someone to punish.

The trust we are after is neither blind nor naive. It rests on five simple rules: what matters is visible, what is promised is owned, what is decided can be found again, what is not working can be reported, and the rules apply equally to the people who run the company.

That is the starting point for everything that follows.