FM-16: Process Inflation
A pattern. Every step was added to help. Now the process is the work.
Justin R. Greenbaum · The Lexicon · July 2026
A director of operations knows a two-page approval used to take a morning, but three teams have each bolted on a required sign-off since, so a routine request now takes nine days, because every step closed a real gap and no one owns the total. A compliance officer wants the control to catch risk, but the checklist has grown to forty items nobody reads in full, so it gets clicked through on faith. A senior engineer can ship the fix in an afternoon, but the change-management workflow demands four gates designed for a release ten times the size, so the afternoon becomes a week. A team lead sees her people using a side channel to get real work done, but the official process is the one that gets audited, so she maintains both, because the paperwork proves the work happened even when the work is elsewhere.
None of these people are failing. Each one is feeding a process that has outgrown the problem it was built to solve.
This has a name. It is Process Inflation.
Here’s the pattern. When the shared story that once told people why the work mattered goes quiet, process rushes in to hold things together, and procedure begins standing in for the meaning it replaced. From there it compounds. Each addition solves a local problem; no one owns the cumulative burden; risk aversion favors adding a step over removing one. Complexity accumulates beyond the original purpose. What began as lightweight coordination hardens into heavyweight procedure, until the workflow becomes the work. And because more steps look like more care, the organization reads its own thickening as a sign of maturity.
Procedure masquerades as rigor. The team that adds a gate is called careful. The manager who lengthens the approval chain is called thorough. The function with a documented control for everything is called mature; the one that questions a step has to justify removing it. The signal the system reads is diligence. The condition underneath is an organization spending more and more effort to deliver the same thing, and mistaking the effort for the outcome.
What Process Inflation gets mistaken for is what keeps it alive. We need process to scale. This is just how large organizations work. We need better documentation. People are not following the process. Each reading treats the inflation as either healthy growth or a compliance gap, so the repair is always to add, formalize, or enforce. More process is prescribed for a process problem; the coordination cost is accepted as the price of size; the workarounds are read as indiscipline rather than as evidence the process no longer serves. These readings are how Process Inflation survives contact with the process audit, the one review meant to catch it and the one most easily spent certifying that the steps are being followed rather than asking whether the steps should exist.
The pattern recurs and changes costumes. In one company it is an onboarding checklist that gains a line every time something goes wrong until no one can start work in the first month. In another, a hospital where each incident adds a form until the charting consumes the hour that used to go to the patient. In a third, an agency so wrapped in its own procedure that a routine decision now needs its own procedure to move through the procedure.
Training people on the process does not interrupt it; a well-run heavy process is still heavy. Hiring a process owner for each step does not interrupt it; it gives every step a defender and no one a mandate to subtract. Replacing the manager who let it grow does not interrupt it; the replacement inherits the same asymmetry, where adding a step is safe and removing one carries all the risk.
What interrupts it is structural. Put sunset clauses on new processes, so every step has to earn its renewal instead of living forever by default. Make the total cost of coordination visible in one place, so the burden now spread across everyone lands on a single desk. Give someone the authority to remove a step without assembling the consensus that adding it never required. Where the accumulation has already buried the work, the fail-safe is a periodic process audit with a deletion mandate, a standing review whose job is not to certify adherence but to cut.
When Process Inflation has a name, the options change.
The engineer who has been maintaining two workflows stops calling it diligence and sees a process that no longer touches the work. The manager above stops praising the thoroughness and asks what it now costs to deliver the same result. The executive stops reading a fully documented control set as safety and asks how much velocity and judgment the controls have quietly spent. The board stops accepting “we have mature processes” and asks whether the processes still serve the outcome or have become the outcome.
Naming does not fix. Naming changes what can be seen. What can be seen is what can be acted on.
If any of this feels familiar, it has a name and a taxonomy.
The canonical definition of FM-16, including its early warning signals, common misdiagnoses, and recovery conditions, is at dripractice.com/fm/fm-16.
A role-specific view of how the same pattern looks from the legal and compliance seat is at dripractice.com/lens/legal-and-compliance.
A five-minute diagnostic that runs entirely on your device and never leaves it is at dripractice.com/diagnose.
Next in The Lexicon: FM-06, Exception Inflation. Every heavy process breeds its own escape hatches, and the exceptions meant to relieve it slowly become the real operating system. FM-06 is what happens when “just this once” becomes how the work actually runs.
Subscribe to The Lexicon.