Martin Lindstrom, founder and chairman of Lindstrom Company, says that many companies are still held back by doing things the way they’ve always done them, or failing to break down bureaucracy. For Lindstrom, it’s not just about getting away from bureaucratic norms for the sake of innovation, but because so many things workers do each and every day don’t actually make much sense. He suggests workers, leaders, and organizations consider ways in which processes can be improved – and the ways these new processes can improve life for everyone. And he argues that companies should actually devote a team or department to making sure common sense is used throughout the organization. Lindstrom is the author of the book The Ministry of Common Sense: How to Eliminate Bureaucratic Red Tape, Bad Excuses, and Corporate BS.
ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.
After the year we’ve all had with such huge disruptions to the way we do work, a lot of leaders and especially employees don’t really want to go back to business as usual. People are thinking about how to improve organizational life. One way we can do that is by breaking down bureaucracy.
Do you have rules and regulation that make it a lot harder to get things done, or get slowed down by over-the-top compliance concerns, confusing technology, too many meetings? Even worse, do you make your customers jump through crazy hoops? So many businesses are set up in ways that don’t make sense for how human beings actually think, act, and behave. This lack of empathy for workers, for consumers, for people stands in the way of productivity and success.
Today’s guest wants us all to declare war on bureaucracy and bring back common sense. Martin Lindstrom is the founder and chairman of Lindstrom Company and the author of the book “The Ministry of Common Sense: How to Eliminate Bureaucratic Red Tape, Bad Excuses, and Corporate BS.” Martin, thanks so much for being here.
MARTIN LINDSTROM: Thank you, Alison.
ALISON BEARD: Obviously, no one likes bureaucracy. We all want our organizations to be more user-friendly and efficient. Why do companies have such a hard time making that happen?
MARTIN LINDSTROM: Listen, it comes with age. The bigger a company becomes, the older it becomes, and the more layers it has, the more bureaucracy you will see coming into the organization. Bureaucracy really is the lack of common sense, or what I call nonsense, because what is happening is you’re creating your own set of rules. You start to see the world from inside out rather than outside in. That’s the reason why suddenly companies realize one day from another that, “Hey, do you know what? We’ve lost contact with our customers. We lost contact with our consumers.” Because they’re so busy just creating a lot of guidelines internally to survive. Of course, with all that bureaucracy is coming and red tape is going to be part of the whole picture.
ALISON BEARD: It’s not just losing connection with customers, right? It’s also losing contact with frontline employees who know how things are working on the ground and how many hurdles are being put in their way.
MARTIN LINDSTROM: It is, because what happens is that silos are created. Silos really increasingly has become so prominent that it’s very, very hard for people to have anything done in an organization. Think about it. Suddenly I’m paid for based on how well I’m doing in my little function. Perhaps my department has KPIs attached to what that department is achieving, but I really don’t care about what the other departments are doing. Think about the frontline people. Why should I care about those people? Quite often, I’m seeing a huge disconnect between what goes on in the organization and outside when it comes to the frontline.
A really good example was for a major bank I worked for in Asia, and that bank actually closed down its branch offices every Sunday, even though customers would love to do banking on Sundays. I went out to the employees at the frontline and I said to them, “Wouldn’t it be clever if you open up this branch office?” They said, “Yeah, absolutely. But in headquarter, they claim it’s not worth it.” I said, “Let me just understand one thing. I noticed whenever I pass by a bank branch office that the light is always on and the air conditioning looks like it’s on as well.” They said, “Yeah, that’s the rule. We need to have all that stuff running on Sundays as well. By the way, we also need to have at least two staff stand by in the bank.” “But you’re not allowed to open the bank?” “No, we’re not, because they think it costs extra.”
This is where we are. They actually did open the bank and staff. They actually were right. Suddenly customers were happy. They actually earned money from it, and that disconnect between the headquarter and the frontline was certainly coming together. Right?
ALISON BEARD: How do these rules and regulations arise in the first place? We can look at them from that outside perspective and say, “Gosh, that really makes no sense.” But why did the bank, for example, not consider opening on Sundays in the beginning? Is it just legacy?
MARTIN LINDSTROM: It comes down to the lack of empathy. This sounds crazy when I tell you this, but what we’ve learned, what I’ve learned is that there’s a direct correlation between empathy and common sense. The more common sense, the stronger degree of empathy. The best way for me to illustrate that is to take you back in time.
A couple of years ago, two crazy young guys were sitting in the dorm room smoking weeds. One of the guys said to the other, “Hey, I’m going to shoot a photo of you.” And he did. Of course, panic broke loose. Parents saw it, they freaked out, and the guy said to the other guy the day after, “Hey, we shouldn’t have done that. But do you know what? Wouldn’t it have been cool if we could retract that photo and destroy it?” They looked at each other and that became Snapchat, which is today, and you know, a $50 billion company based on a simple idea.
Now, the reason why I tell you about this is because they felt a sense of empathy with the audience, which happened to be themselves. Most, if not all, new companies feel that. They feel a sense of empathy because the owner, herself or himself, felt that problem, saw the opportunity, the gap between where it is and where it could go. That really has been driving these organizations. But what happens over time is, as new staff are entering, as the founder is leaving, as the company suddenly is being sued left, right, and center, that this immune system, as I call, is established. It’s a defense mechanism for change. What is happening is that they’re more busy protecting themself and being overly cautious.
ALISON BEARD: You’ve consulted with companies around the world in all different types of industries. Do you see this problem, this lack of empathy, this lack of common sense everywhere?
MARTIN LINDSTROM: I have to tell you, yes, and it’s becoming severe because what happens is that employees really have no interest in listening to other colleagues in the company. With COVID-19 and most of the world stuck behind a screen, it’s just added another dimension to it. At least in the old days you would walk into a meeting room and you’ll say, “Hey, there’s some bad wipes here.” You can’t even do that anymore. Those ways of us to connect with each other kind of disappears, it becomes really a rational conversation you have on Microsoft Teams on Zoom or Skype.
First of all, yes, it’s further amplified. The second thing is, I hate to tell you, but I do think that we clearly see that the US right now is in the clear lead of lack of empathy at the workplace. Basically, just after, you will see companies like Germany, certainly France, Switzerland, and then you can go to certain places in Asia where you’ll also see it. It is a global business pandemic, so to speak. I think we probably will see the situation get worse before it gets better, which really is the reason why I wrote the book, because I do see this as being extraordinary concerning.
Let me just throw in an example of that. One of my clients, which is Maersk, which is the largest shipping company in the world, they sit on 21% of all trade, invited me to go to their Chinese office because the NPS score, the net promoter score, so the customer satisfaction has just gone down a lot. As I was sitting in the offices listening to people calling in, all the complaints arriving into this huge call center, I noticed something unusual happens. Whenever a person in the call center tapped down what the reason was, because you had to do that in order to move on, in 9 out of 10 cases, if not even more, they tapped a little box saying, “Force majeure.” Both you and I know what it means. It means an earthquake or COVID-19, right?
But not every single thing, right? I said to them later on, “Why do you do that?” They looked at me and they said, and they had no regret in their voices, they said, “Because we measure it based on time, how quick we are able to turn around the call, how quick we are able to close this customer complaint. If you tick the force majeure button, you’ll only have to fill out one page. But if you tick any other boxes, it will take three pages and it doesn’t match with our KPIs.” I think that’s really symptomatic for the issue because remember these costumers complaining now, if you attach force majeure to it, you can’t claim insurance because the systems with the silos and the KPIs not working together within the system, what happens suddenly is that you have a conflict, and in the end of the day, the lack of empathy wins and common sense is out of the window.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. This does seem to be a time where people are willing to look at their organizations the way we do business with fresh eyes. You talk about several areas where bureaucracy creeps in, so I’d love to just break those down a little bit. You mentioned compliance before, obviously that does slow people down, but I would say that some managers would argue it’s a function of what governments are requiring organizations to do rather than something they can change themselves. Is that true in your experience, or are people going above and beyond what they have to do?
MARTIN LINDSTROM: Listen, Alison, I think the truth is always in the middle, and the truth really, in this case, is defined, again, by seeing the world from another point of view. Let me give you two different examples trying to explain this from a different point of view. If I should go back to the banking world for a second, one of the key challenges I noticed was that people in general have no time at all to fill out the emails to do their work. I did a huge workshop with about 1,200 bankers in New York City just last year. During the workshop, I said to them, “What frustrates you the most?” Literally every single person said, “I have too many emails. I just can’t handle it anymore.” I said, “How many is too many?” They said, “Well, we receive on average 800 emails per day.”
If you do the math, that’s the same as if you just use one minute on reading and replying to the same email, that adds up to 13 hours of emails every day and you haven’t even begun your work. I said to them, “Hey, why don’t we have one thing in mind. There is a direct correlation between the number of emails you send and the number of emails you receive. If we have that, you basically half your inbox.”
Here’s my thinking. How many of you guys are reading the CC, the copy, when you receive them? Out of a room of 1,200, I think less than 20 raised their hand. They literally do not read them. I said, “Why don’t we kill it? Why don’t we get rid of that button once and for all in Microsoft Outlook?” They looked at me like they had this… It was like a deer from the headlight, right? One guy said, “Compliance will never agree to that.” I said, “Well, you just told me that less than 20 of you guys in a room of 1,200 read those emails.” I went around, and those 20 people are all from compliance. I said, “What is the issue here?” The issue is we are really good at finding excuses upfront because we’re afraid of the unknown, the consequences of this.
We literally introduced this. We removed the CC button. Today, this year, one year later, they, on average, according to this team receive around 350 emails a day, and it’s with one simple action. So far, I have not received a single complaint from compliance or legal or the regulatory issues within the bank, because the fact is sometimes we just need to be pushed into a new territory and see the world from a different point of view.
ALISON BEARD: Do even small changes like the ones we’re talking about, experiments, need to come from the top-down? Can it be done on one team and then spread throughout the organization? Do you run the risk of having different rules for different people?
MARTIN LINDSTROM: It is a super good question. I think I’ve learned over the years that, if you really want this to work, it has to happen both from top-down and bottom-up. Top-down is really for you to get a mandate. The mandate means that once there’s an initiative you want to do, that it will happen. But the bottom-down is to prove to the rest of the organization, including what I define as the froze middle, the paralyzed middle, which quite often is the hardest part to change or transform in the organization, is to get them with you.
What I’ve learned is, if you do a change in the organization, the best thing you can do is actually to make it happen at a grassroot level. It is to make it happen down at security, at the reception level, among the PAs, at a place outside, for example, at the frontline, at a place where normally these guys and girls are never heard. Once you give them the opportunity to come up with a great, simple idea which will have a profound impact, then what you do is you jump into secret express elevator and you go up to the top of the management and you say to them, “Here’s an idea from Mrs. Smith. It’s a great idea, simple to introduce. Should we do it?” Of course, they will say yes in most of the cases. So you go down in your express elevator and you say to her, “People love your idea.” You’ll implement it with Mrs. Smith and you’ll do it for 90 days and then you’ll make Mrs. Smith the hero in the organization, and you celebrate it a lot.
ALISON BEARD: What if you’re someone who doesn’t have access to that elevator to the C-suite? Is it okay to do your experiment and ask forgiveness, not permission?
MARTIN LINDSTROM: Absolutely. It’s just down my alley. What you do is, you do it and you don’t tell anyone about it. You literally don’t tell, because here’s the issue. If you really want to make a change happen, in my opinion, what you have to do is to build up a small army within the organization willing to create a small movement because they are, as most people are, deeply frustrated about bureaucracy and red tape and all that stuff.
My advice quite often is the following. It is to do something under the radar, ask for forgiveness, and use that piece of evidence you now have that it actually worked as evidence for doing something even more. I think the best example I can say with you is from a large pharma company I work with. These guys are the leader in the respiratory field. I asked the company, they’ve been around for nearly 100 years, I asked them, “When did you last interview some of your patients?” And they said, “Never. Compliance won’t allow us to do it. I said, “BS.” Right? So we went to compliance. I had a chat with them and they were pretty nice. They said, “We’ve never been asked about it.” It’s so funny how you just see the world from different points of view.
Anyway, we persuaded them to do it. We went out to the patients, and I will never forget it, I had two lower level executives with me in this home. I asked this young lady, she was 28 years of age, I asked her about how she felt having asthma when she was young. It was a very sensitive topic. She started to cry. It was very emotional. She told me that she was teased in school, she had no friends. Whenever there was a class party going on, she was never invited because she was an embarrassment, as they said. I said to her, “You look pretty happy today. What changed?” She looks at me and then she goes down in her bag, and in her bag she pulls out a straw. She said, “That’s my secret. Whenever I have a new friend, I meet a new person, I always give them a new straw. And I ask them to hold themself on the nose and breathe through the straw for a minute. After one minute, they have empathy. They understand and feel how I feel.”
Everyone, at this division level, got it. We immediately started to say, “Okay, let’s change the way we do innovation. Let’s change the way we communicate. But we didn’t have the power to do it. So I said, “Let’s do this experiment with senior management.” We literally took that straw and, we were lucky, we persuaded senior management at a board meeting to take the straw and put it into their mouth. We had 20 people at a board level literally taking the straw into their mouth, and then I had this sound being played in the background of heavy breathing, like this, “Huhh huhh,” in the background. After 30 seconds, one executive at the board level, he spit out the straw. He said, “This is ridiculous. Who the heck is going to live like this?” I looked him in his eyes and I said, “Do you know what? That’s how your patients feel like every minute of their entire life.”
At that second, it was like you could feel a penny drop on the floor. That piece of evidence spinning out of an exercise done under the radar in one division far away from the headquarter was actually the main reason why this company suddenly changed their entire behavior.
ALISON BEARD: So many of your stories involve you, this impartial, outside observer who clearly has a lot of personality and pizzazz and energy coming in and pointing out things that you notice, asking questions. How do people within organizations develop that fresh set of eyes?
MARTIN LINDSTROM: I think the most important thing to do is to get rid of what I call your culture glasses. There’s a German term called [German word]. It really is the whole philosophy of that, when we are part of a tribe, we tend to see the world from only that point of view and that becomes a self-reinforcing worldview. What happens is that, over the time, we suddenly can’t see what’s right and what’s wrong. We become blind, or rather, drinking of the Kool-Aid.
The most important thing you can do is to get rid of your culture glasses. In my opinion, you can do that by analyzing your day. If I, for example, were to look at our life today, this is our life today, with COVID-19, we’re sitting behind Zoom 8 or 10 hours a day, there’s no toilet breaks anymore, they kind of disappeared. I don’t know why. By the way, every meeting lasts exactly for one hour no matter how mundane and irrelevant it is, because else you feel like you’re skulking or you’re not the right person sitting there.
What we are doing right now is that we’re applying an old way of living to a new way of doing business without actually adjusting it to a new environment. I tend to say that there’s no going back to work. I call it going forward to work. The issue I see is that, right now, this is the biggest and best opportunity we probably will have ever in our lifetime to reset the way we work. The way I tend to do that is to say, “Let’s restructure your daily lives.”
If you imagine you have four different buckets, and one bucket is called eliminate, one is called pack, one is called improve, and one is called retain. If you were to look at your daily life and analyze everything you do from the morning you wake up to when you go to bed, what you would realize is a lot of the stuff you do today actually is not very efficient. It’s not very fulfilling, and in fact, it doesn’t make sense. Structure your daily life. Try to go through your daily life for fun over the last week or next two weeks, and put it into one of these four buckets.
What you will notice is that there’ll be a lot of stuff down in the eliminate and pack. What you will notice is that they quite often have one thing in common. They are frictions, frictions with surroundings, and maybe you’re doing things in a certain way which, if you look at it from a different point of view, you actually could do it better. You just haven’t had the time to do it, or you just don’t have the energy for doing it.
My first advice here is to say, “Okay, find one friction, one little thing which frustrates you a lot.” And then try to engage your co-fellow workers and give them the same challenge. The best way to do this is to take photos. Use your smartphone, take a photo of that frustration you have, whatever that can be, and then you should compare notes. Monday morning on a call, unless you see each other, you say, “Well, that was my frustration number one.” And everyone else does the same. I bet you that 60 or 70% of the frustrations will be exactly the same, because here’s the issue. We all have frustrations where we blame ourself from being the stupid person. In particular, when it comes to technology, “Oh, no, I didn’t fill it out right, or I can’t remember passwords. Silly me.” What happens now is that, as you have the same friction as your colleagues, then you should give each other a challenge. Let’s fix this in just 90 days, and then you throw resources at it, and quite often the solution can be really straightforward.
ALISON BEARD: We are focusing pretty heavily on for-profit businesses. I would say that a lot of people would say that the most bureaucracy you find in the public sector, particularly in the government. Do you have any specific advice for frontline workers, managers, leaders who are working in government agencies, including the incoming Biden administration?
MARTIN LINDSTROM: Thank you for a very simple and easy to solve problem. Right? I think the most important thing is, and I’ll go back to my mantra that is to ask yourself what would happen if the private sector was given this challenge. If you take the COVID and the vaccine coming out right now, the first thing I would say around that issue is that you need to be much more prepared to approach this challenge in a different way. The first question I always will ask is, “Who is really, really good at handling crowd control?” Because this is a matter about pumping through an enormous amount of vaccine through a lot of arms over a very short period of time. Once you ask that question, the answer is very simple. The answer is airports. Airports are really good at handling a lot of traffic, and airports are operating now not even at half capacity, but at one-fifth capacity. Even some airports are closed down.
What I would do is to use facilities in a different way to basically say, “Let’s figure out what government arms, what outlets can we use to solve some of these problems?” I don’t need to tell you, if the Biden administration solves the vaccine rollout in a very efficient way, that is their first proof point. That’s where people will say, “Oh, okay.” If they mess it up, then people will immediately use that as an evidence for not believing in the further changes.
I would take a different approach. I would also team up with companies. Every company have an in-house doctor if they’re of a certain size. Use your companies to do the vaccine rollout. Use what some of the states have done now to use retired nurses and do this with them. What I’m saying here is try to adopt this from a different point of view. The most important thing coming back to your question is to say, if there is 20 nurses, which actually all of them agreed to that we should get hold of retired nurses and bring them in, do it. Don’t wait. Try to do many trials with permission from whoever and have your little piece of experiment going on in a positive way where you know, where you’ll always see this new transformation happening.
Once you’ve done that for a week or two, package this up as a case and put it online. Use the tube. Show it online, say, “Hey, we did this here. We will recommend other people to do it.” Then use the movement, because people are so emotionally engaged in this situation that you actually can use word of mouth to spread the word. Do not go through the red tape in the government organizations, because if you do that, they will go back to the default behavior of how we did things. But as it’s a new administration, one would also assume they want to have a new approach. Very simple advice. Gather with your friends and colleagues, build up a case, send it online, of course be safe in what you’re doing, and then use that as a case to create a movement.
ALISON BEARD: I like it. Don’t wait, do it, no excuses. Martin, thanks so much for being on the show today.
MARTIN LINDSTROM: You’re welcome, Alison.
ALISON BEARD: That’s Martin Lindstrom. He is the author of the book “The Ministry of Common Sense: How to Eliminate Bureaucratic Red Tape, Bad Excuses, and Corporate BS”.
This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Alison Beard.