What’s your bureaucracy ratio?

Frustrated with little delivery despite lots of planning?

Do yourself a favour and figure out your bureaucracy ratio.

(Yes, I just made that up).

What is the proportion of do-ers to non-do-ers in your organisation?

How many people are sitting in meetings discussing what needs to be delivered, designing artefacts showing a hypothetical operating model for how delivery will be enabled, getting into debates over semantics, trying to design intellectually elegant universal theories of everything, and avoiding difficult conversations?

And how many people are JFDI? Designing screens, doing research with users, agreeing data schema, doing coding, running penetration testing, writing call centre scripts, building tools, designing letters, actively prioritising and deprioritising work in progress, negotiating with colleagues on REAL blockers preventing ACTUAL delivery?

I've seen poor bureaucracy ratios in quite a few organisations.

When they've managed to get things delivered, it has been because they've either (a) put in the hard work to win hearts and minds and slim down the machine; (b) set up a separate organisation, like a skunkworks or incubator, which could ignore the bureaucracy; (c) given delivery teams an exemption from having to engage with them; or (d) kept the non-do-ers otherwise distracted while the team got on and did things. Only (a) leads to sustainable delivery conditions - the other things aren't transformational - but it does seem the rarest and most fragile of the set.