Hello
It’s Thursday, 5th November 2026. Welcome to Bold Efforts!
Every workplace has its little absurdities. You fill out a form with information that's already in the system. You attend a meeting to discuss a report that everyone has already read. You wait three days for an approval that takes thirty seconds to give.
Most of us shrug and move on. It's just how things work.
Many of these processes were probably good ideas when someone introduced them.
A project went over budget, so a new approval was added. A customer complained, so another review became mandatory. Leadership wanted better visibility, so someone created a weekly report. Two departments couldn't agree on their numbers, so a spreadsheet appeared to reconcile them.
Individually, these decisions made sense. Collectively, they created a workplace that nobody would have deliberately designed.
And that's how organizations become complicated. Not through one spectacularly bad decision, but through hundreds of perfectly reasonable ones.
The problem with doing things the way we've always done them
Companies are surprisingly good at adding things and remarkably bad at removing them.
There's a simple reason. Introducing a new process makes someone look proactive. Removing an existing one creates risk.
If you eliminate an unnecessary approval and everything runs smoothly, nobody notices. If something goes wrong, everyone remembers whose idea it was.
So processes survive. People build routines around them, software gets configured to support them, and new employees learn to follow them. Eventually, nobody remembers why they were introduced.
Technology hasn't necessarily solved this.
We've turned paper forms into online forms, filing cabinets into cloud storage, and manual reports into automated dashboards. All useful improvements, but sometimes we've simply made unnecessary work easier to perform.
A report that nobody reads is still a waste of time, even if a computer produces it in three seconds.
What if we asked a different question?
Much of the excitement around AI is about doing things faster. Writing emails, preparing presentations, summarizing documents, analyzing spreadsheets.
And that's genuinely useful. I've experienced it firsthand while building Fursa, where we reduced roughly 200 hours of monthly manual operations to around 10.
But the most interesting improvements weren't always about making individual tasks faster. They came from reconsidering how the work was organized in the first place.
Which information actually needed checking? Which problems could be prevented instead of repeatedly fixed? Which decisions required a person, and which didn't?
Sometimes removing a step was more valuable than automating it. I think there's a broader lesson here.
Imagine a company where five people spend every Monday preparing reports for a Tuesday leadership meeting. The obvious opportunity is to automate those reports.
But perhaps the leadership team doesn't need five reports. Perhaps it needs a clear view of what's changed, what requires attention, and which decisions need to be made.
Those are two very different problems to solve. One makes the existing process faster. The other questions whether the process should exist at all.
Of course, there's a catch
Not everything that looks inefficient is unnecessary.
Some approvals exist because expensive mistakes happened. Some checks catch problems that appear only occasionally. Some informal workarounds contain years of knowledge that nobody has bothered to document.
What looks like bureaucracy to one person might be an important safeguard to another.
That's why changing how work gets done requires more than a clever piece of technology. It requires understanding people, incentives, history, and the consequences of getting things wrong.
It's also why I suspect the companies that benefit most from AI won't necessarily be the ones that automate the most tasks.
They'll be the ones willing to reconsider how they operate, while being thoughtful about what deserves to stay.
There's something appealing about that possibility. For decades, we've used technology to help people navigate increasingly complicated organizations. Maybe we can now use it to make some of those organizations less complicated.
We spend a lot of time asking how to do our work better, faster, and cheaper. Perhaps we should occasionally ask why we're doing it at all. Thank you for reading.
Best,
Kartik
I write Bold Efforts every week to think clearly about where work and life are actually headed. If you want these essays in your inbox, you can subscribe here.