Structures, Processes, Vendors

Policies are meant to serve outcomes. If a policy prevents a logical solution or a good user outcome, the policy (or its interpretation) should be challenged, not blindly followed.

This is HiPPO-driven development. Leadership provides direction, but implementation must solve a verified user problem. Blind execution often leads to expensive white elephants.

This is 'Not Invented Here' syndrome. You are trading the reliability of a proven market solution for the burden of maintaining a custom tool forever, usually just to satisfy a desire for 'control'.

They are going to milk you like a cash cow via Change Requests. If you are the only client asking for this feature, you are now maintaining a fork of their software.

Bureaucracy has crept in. If you need a committee to change a typo, your governance structure is broken.

The most dangerous phrase in business. It ignores technological advancements and changing user needs.

Over-classifying data forces you into expensive, cumbersome compliance architectures that kill agility without reducing real-world risk.

This is 'Legacy on Arrival'. Choosing a framework that peaked over a decade ago for a greenfield project signals that the team has not upskilled. You are creating technical debt before the first line of code is even written.

It increases maintenance costs by 10x. Unless you have Google's scale, you are paying for complexity you don't need.

Everyone just sits quietly in meetings. Nobody speaks up or disagrees.

If all your metrics are green but the product isn't shipping, you are managing "impression" rather than reality.

This is shooting the messenger. You are training your team to practice "Impression Management" rather than problem-solving.

Framing complex work as "pure execution" forces teams to hide reality. If you demand efficiency on innovation work, you incentivize people to bury problems.

The "Pinocchio Effect": Liars use more words and distance themselves from the lie using third-person pronouns. A trustworthy partner usually says "I" or "We" and keeps it simple.

Waiver culture. When teams systematically use waivers to defer critical work, technical debt accumulates unchecked. This creates fragile, unmaintainable systems that eventually collapse under their own weight.

You need a "Guiding Coalition" of 5 to 50 people with real power. A lone wolf gets eaten.

The "Comfort Zone" (safe + low standards) is useless. We want the "Learning Zone" (safe + high standards).

If you punish an experimental failure the same way you punish a lazy error, people will stop experimenting.