The Dark Side of Operational Excellence: When Perfectionism Kills Productivity

Operational excellence is supposed to make the company stronger.

In a lot of places, it just makes the work slower.

You give it impressive names. Operating model maturity. World class standards. Scalable processes. It all sounds like grown up leadership.

On the ground it feels different. More approvals. More templates. More required fields in tools. More meetings about how work should flow. Less actual work moving.

You think you are building discipline.

You are building operational perfectionism.

And it is quietly strangling productivity.

When Excellence Becomes Control In Disguise

Real operational excellence makes it easier to do the right thing and harder to do something obviously reckless. It clarifies ownership. It cuts down on confusion. It removes unnecessary choices.

Perfectionism has a different goal. It tries to make the wrong thing impossible.

That difference matters.

Excellence assumes competent adults who want to do good work. It designs for flow and recovery. Perfectionism assumes the team is one bad day away from blowing everything up. It designs for control and insurance.

So every time something goes wrong you do the same thing:

Another rule.

Another checklist.

Another required approval.

Another form field.

Individually, each change looks smart. Put together, they form a net the work has to fight its way through.

You do not notice the cost right away. You only notice that everything feels heavier than it should.

The Hidden Tax Of “Just One More Step”

Perfectionism rarely announces itself. It sneaks in through small, reasonable sounding decisions.

“Just add a second reviewer so this does not slip again.”

“Just require a doc for any initiative over X.”

“Just make Legal and Security sign off on this class of change.”

“Just ask teams to log all of that in the system.”

Every “just” is a tax on operator time.

None of these on their own look like a big deal. You can always argue the risk angle. You can always point at some past incident as justification.

What you do not see is the compounding effect:

• People stop kicking off small experiments because the process cost rivals the value.

• ICs start managing artifacts about work instead of the work itself.

• Managers turn into routers whose job is to escort tasks through checkpoints.

• Teams learn that the real game is not impact. It is surviving the gauntlet.

Your system is no longer helping them execute. It is a test they have to pass.

Process Theater In A Nice Suit

You know you have crossed the line when operating well turns into performing operations.

From the outside, everything looks sharp. You see pristine Notion spaces or Confluence hubs. You see well structured Jira projects. You see calendars full of governance and review sessions. You see dashboards and scorecards.

From the inside, it looks like this:

Documentation that is technically correct and practically unusable in the moment.

Review forums that are good at avoiding blame and bad at making real decisions.

Metrics that are carefully tracked and almost never used to cut bad work.

Retros that generate action items that disappear into the same overloaded system.

If you ask someone doing the work how much of this actually helps them ship better, you do not get strong answers. You get shrugging. You get “This is just how we do it here.” You get “If we skip it, it bites us later,” even when nobody can name the last time that happened.

That is not excellence. That is theater designed to keep everyone emotionally safe while the business slows down.

Systems That Assume Idiots Create Idiots

The worst part is how perfectionism hardens inside your backend systems.

You see it in:

Processes written to protect against the weakest operator instead of empowering the average one. One bad handoff becomes a multi step choreography that slows down everyone forever.

SOPs built to impress auditors instead of helping operators. Long, careful documents that cover every edge case and force people to skim or ignore them when things are actually moving.

Tools that collect everything and clarify nothing. More fields, more tags, more categories. Tickets that are perfectly filled out and painfully stuck.

Governance that treats reversible decisions like permanent ones. Choices that should be made by a team lead this afternoon are dragged into a cross functional forum three weeks from now.

If you assume people will fail without constant guardrails, you will eventually make that true. You create an environment where nobody is trusted, so nobody bothers to sharpen judgment.

The Damage You Cannot See On A Dashboard

Perfection driven operations usually do not implode. They erode.

You see new initiatives that never get proposed because everyone knows the process overhead will murder them.

You see experienced hires who take too long to ramp because they are learning the system, not the work.

You see the strongest operators quietly bypass the process just to get anything moving. Leadership tolerates it because those are the only people still delivering.

You see that the only way to move fast is to be important enough to get exemptions.

On paper, you have standards.

In reality, you have a two tier system. Official process for show. Shadow process for results.

That is not operational excellence. That is a slow leak in your ability to execute.

Excellence Has Teeth. Perfectionism Has Handcuffs.

Excellence is not soft. It has teeth. It holds people accountable. It forces clarity. It simplifies the path and removes excuses.

But it stays grounded in reality:

Things will break.

People will mess up.

Not every failure deserves a new rule.

So excellence focuses on:

Clear ownership.

Simple, visible standards.

Fast feedback loops.

Cheap recovery when something goes wrong.

Perfectionism cannot tolerate pain. Every incident must be engineered out of existence. Every uncomfortable surprise must result in another layer.

That feels responsible.

It is actually cowardly.

You are trading long term execution for short term emotional comfort.

If You Want Real Excellence, Start Subtracting

If this sounds like your org, you will not fix it with yet another operating model slide.

You fix it with a knife.

Walk through your core processes, SOPs, and governance rituals and ask a direct question for each step and artifact:

What specific failure or outcome does this protect or enable, and is that worth the time it costs every week?

If you cannot answer cleanly, it goes on the chopping block.

Treat operator time like budget. If you add a control, remove a different one. If you create a new required artifact, make sure a real decision uses it.

Classify decisions as reversible or hard to unwind. Push reversible ones down and speed them up. Save the heavy machinery for the calls that actually matter.

At Ushiro Labs, we care less about how impressive your process looks and more about one blunt fact.

Does your structure help smart people move, or does it give them more places to hide and stall?

If your “operational excellence” makes your best people quieter, slower, and more reluctant to start, you do not have excellence at all.

You have built a polished, well documented way to waste potential.

From afar, always rooting for your success.

-Ushiro Labs