Ideally, organizations diversify and specialize separate functions — that is, they create bureaucracies — for better efficiency. And it works: it doesn’t make sense to have your top salesperson and your top accounts-receivable clerk sharing each other’s duties.

But it’s also human nature to protect turf, and it’s in the nature of organizations, best I can tell, to develop points of friction — or chokepoints.

More on this in a follow-up post.

Granted, scheduling things like a conference room is something that shouldn’t take long to do, but there are times when simply getting things accomplished is harder than it should be just to “follow protocol” or “process”. So I can see chokepoints being all over the place that would take an army to change.

And I am also finding out here at my company that because systems have been in place so long, people want to avoid change, even if it’s means a change for the better. So it’s a vicious cycle at times too.