Your team isn't slow. It's buried under layers of process nobody questioned. Every methodology, every recurring meeting, every checklist felt reasonable the day it was added — and that's exactly why too much process is so hard to see. None of them is the problem. The accumulation is.
I call it constraint decay. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
The problem: too much process, not too little
Most teams meet friction by adding structure. A process for this. A convention for that. A template, a ritual, a sign-off. Each new rule looks like control.
It isn't free.
Every rule you add taxes every future decision. It has to be remembered, satisfied, and reconciled with all the others already in place. That tax is paid in the scarcest resource a team has: decision cycles. The cost is invisible at first. The system absorbs it. People adapt. Throughput holds.
Until it doesn't.
This is an excerpt. The full teardown — complexity scorecard, data, and the BBM-approved alternative — is at brainbrutalism.com.
