Good processes the answer to challenging politics

Clarity and tight decision making loops are a critcal part of this. Some great thoughts on this from Scott Berkun.

Only good processes keep politics at bay. Mediocre processes amplify politics by creating more turf and more restrictions. Any process should include a clause that defines when the process is no longer necessary. This almost never happens and the result is rules live on forever even after if their usefulness died years ago. Process should be a slave to results, but it rarely is. It’s often the other way around.

“the bottleneck is never code or creativity; its clarity”

Any moderate sized corporation is a wasteland of indecisiveness: it’s all committees, review meetings and endless email chains. We all know too many people have veto powers. If you simply clarified who was the equivalent of a film director for a product, or a division, who was empowered to break ties, everyone would be freed to do better work: they’d spend more time actually working and less time fighting over turf.

Source: FAQ about The Year Without Pants (with satisfying answers) | Scott Berkun, Feb. 2014