In a single workshop session, a room full of AT&T employees identified more than 450 rules that needed to be changed or eliminated, and they did it in just five minutes.
There was no lengthy strategy process or special task force behind it. Just one well-framed prompt and a room of people finally given permission to say what many of them already knew: a surprising number of workplace rules no longer serve a useful purpose.
That number is worth sitting with, because it points to something leaders rarely want to admit. The rules aren’t broken because people are careless. They’re broken because nobody has asked, out loud and on the record, whether they still make sense. Give employees a structured, low-stakes way to name what’s slowing them down, and the list writes itself in minutes, not months.
The Gap Between Complexity and Value
Large organizations do not set out to create unnecessary complexity. They build a rule to solve a real problem, then another, then another, until the accumulated weight starts working against the people it was meant to protect. A Harvard Business Review survey of more than 7,000 readers found that bureaucratic drag wastes time, stalls decisions, and pulls attention away from customers, and the effect grows sharper as companies scale.
Leaders often assume the fix is a policy overhaul or a reorg. But the AT&T exercise points somewhere simpler. Employees already know which rules waste their time. They just haven’t been given a structured, low-stakes way to say so. Give them five minutes and a blank sheet of paper, and the list writes itself.
Why Naming the Rule Is the Hard Part
Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini have spent years documenting this pattern, describing bureaucracy as a tax that saps initiative and slows decision-making at every level. In their Harvard Business Review analysis of how companies dismantle outdated hierarchy, they note that even executives who despise bureaucracy struggle to name which specific rules are the problem, because the rules have become invisible through repetition.
That invisibility is the real obstacle. A rule that once protected the company from a real risk becomes a habit, then a norm, then something nobody questions because questioning it feels risky. The AT&T workshop worked because it gave employees permission to point at something specific instead of complaining in the abstract about “process.”
Inside the Kill a Stupid Rule Process
The AT&T result didn’t happen by accident. It came out of FutureThink’s Kill a Stupid Rule workshop, a structured session built specifically to surface exactly this kind of list, fast. The format is deliberately simple, which is what makes it work:
- A fast, timed brainstorm gets every rule out in the open before anyone has a chance to start defending it.
- Teams plot each rule on a simple matrix, weighing how much it costs against how hard it would be to remove.
- Every rule gets sorted into one of four clear next steps: kill it, change it, pilot a fix, or keep it.
- A guardrail discussion separates real constraints, like legal or compliance requirements, from rules that are simply habits mistaken for policy.
- The session closes with named owners and next steps attached to each rule, so the list leaves the room with momentum instead of sitting on a shelf.
That structure is what turns a venting session into a working list an organization can actually act on within days.
Speed Is a Symptom, Not the Disease
Slow decisions get blamed on culture, or headcount, or leadership style. The research says otherwise. McKinsey’s research on organizational decision-making found that as companies grow, layered accountability and unclear ownership create friction long before any individual decision gets made, and that friction shows up as delay.
McKinsey’s later work quantified the upside of fixing this. A follow-up study on decision quality found that respondents who described their organization’s decisions as fast were nearly twice as likely to also describe them as good. Speed and quality move together far more often than leaders assume, which means the rules slowing a team down are rarely protecting quality. They’re just protecting habit.
What This Looks Like Outside of AT&T
The pattern holds across industries and company sizes. A workshop with 300 employees at Vertex Pharmaceuticals surfaced 63 processes ripe for simplification in under two hours. Chamberlain Group traced more than half a million dollars in estimated savings back to a single session built around the same premise. None of these results came from a consultant handing down recommendations. They came from employees naming what they already knew, in a room built to make that safe.
McKinsey’s explainer on decision-making notes that some executives spend up to 70 percent of their time on decisions, much of it lost to inefficiency rather than genuine complexity. That is the cost of leaving outdated rules in place long after the reason for them has disappeared. It isn’t a talent problem or a technology problem. It’s an unexamined rule problem, and those are far cheaper to fix.
The Leadership Task Is Smaller Than It Looks
None of this requires a mandate from the top or a multi-quarter initiative. Bain’s research published in Harvard Business Review found that agile teams recover energy and speed specifically by challenging the standing rules that no longer serve a purpose, not by adding new frameworks on top of old ones.
The leadership task is narrower than it feels. Build a room where people trust that naming a dumb rule won’t get them in trouble. Give them a short, structured window to do it. Then act on what surfaces instead of filing it away. Recent research from Hamel and Zanini makes the case plainly: cutting bureaucracy isn’t just an efficiency play, it’s a direct investment in how much initiative and ingenuity a workforce is able to offer.
AT&T didn’t need a multi-quarter consulting engagement to find 450 rules worth killing. It needed a structured session and a room that made honesty cheap. Most organizations are carrying that same list inside their employees right now, waiting for a process built to bring it out.
Sources
- Harvard Business Review, “What We Learned About Bureaucracy from 7,000 HBR Readers”
- Harvard Business Review, “The End of Bureaucracy”
- Harvard Business Review, “Bureaucracy Can Drain Your Company’s Energy. Agile Can Restore It.”
- Harvard Business Review, “The Social Case for Busting Bureaucracy”
- McKinsey & Company, “Untangling Your Organization’s Decision Making”
- McKinsey & Company, “Three Keys to Faster, Better Decisions”
- McKinsey & Company, “What Is Decision Making?”