Why More Process Can Make Your Company Riskier, Not Safer
In the early 1980s a taxi company in Munich ran an experiment that should be taught in every operations meeting. They fitted half their fleet with anti-lock brakes, a clear safety upgrade, left the other half on ordinary brakes, and waited to watch the accident rate fall. It did not fall. Over three years the cabs with the better brakes were in just as many accidents as the ones without, and when researchers placed trained observers in the cars they found out why. The drivers with anti-lock brakes drove faster, braked later, cornered harder, and followed the car in front more closely. The safety device worked exactly as designed. The drivers simply spent the safety it created on going faster, until the risk settled back to roughly where it started.
This is the uncomfortable thing about controls. We add them as if risk were a fixed quantity and the control simply subtracts from it, but risk is not fixed, it responds. A safeguard changes how people behave around it, and the behavior change quietly eats much of the safety you thought you bought. Psychologists call this risk compensation, and once you see it you cannot unsee it, because it is the reason adding more process does not reliably make a company safer, and past a certain point starts making it more dangerous.
Inside a company the first thing it produces is a false sense of security. Put five approvals on a decision and a strange thing happens, which is that each person checks a little less carefully because they assume someone else is really looking. The control that was supposed to multiply scrutiny ends up diluting it, because responsibility has been spread so thinly across so many people that it lands firmly on no one. The thing everyone is technically responsible for becomes the thing no one actually owns, and you have managed to add a step while subtracting the very attention the step was meant to provide.
There is a deeper version of the problem that Charles Perrow spent a career documenting in his study of catastrophic failures. His conclusion was that beyond a certain point the safeguards themselves become a source of risk, because every new control adds another interaction, another dependency, another hidden path for things to go wrong, and it makes the whole system harder for any single person to hold in their head. A system you cannot see clearly is a system whose risks you cannot see clearly either, so the complexity you added in the name of safety quietly becomes the fog that hides the next failure. You did not eliminate the danger. You made it harder to find.
No founder sets out to build a system like this. It accretes. Someone drops a ball, so you add an approval. A deal goes sideways, so you add a sign off. A mistake slips through, so you add a checklist, then a tool to manage the checklist, then a weekly meeting to review the tool. Every one of those decisions is a rational response to a real problem, and every one of them is defensible on its own. But a year later you have fourteen steps, four approvers, and three systems that do not quite talk to each other, and the machine is slower, more opaque, and no safer than it was, because all of those controls are now competing for the same scarce attention they were supposed to protect. You did not add safety. You added overhead and called it safety.
The reason this is so hard to catch from the inside is that you built the complexity one reasonable decision at a time, and you have adapted to it, so you no longer experience it as complexity. You experience it as just how things are done here. The cost is invisible to the person who created it, while your team feels it as constant friction, your best people quietly build workarounds, and the genuine risks hide in plain sight inside a process everyone trusts precisely because it looks so thorough.
The discipline that actually lowers risk is not addition, it is subtraction. It means asking of every control what specific failure it is meant to catch, how often that failure really happens, and what it costs in attention and speed to keep the control alive, and then having the nerve to remove the ones that do not earn their place. Fewer, clearer, well owned controls beat more controls almost every time, because a system simple enough to understand is a system whose risks you can actually see and manage. The trouble is that subtraction is far harder than addition, since every control has a story and a sponsor and a fear attached to it, and removing one always feels like inviting back the exact problem it was built to prevent.
This is one of the most useful things an outside perspective can do, because the person who built the complexity is almost always the last person able to see it. Founder Advisory at Founded Partners is designed to give you that vantage point, a confidential weekly relationship with Adam Miron, a serial entrepreneur with three exits including a unicorn and a background in business psychology, who works with you to cut through accumulated process, find the few controls that genuinely matter, and rebuild the clarity and focus that let a scaling company move fast without flying blind. If your operations feel heavier and more complicated every quarter but somehow no safer, that is not a signal that you need another process, it is a signal that you already have too many.
See how Founder Advisory works at foundedpartners.com/founder-advisory, or get in touch to talk through where the complexity in your own company is quietly costing you.