# Bloat Takes the Experts Away From the Work

> As companies grow, the reflex is to add layers and narrow jobs. The quiet cost is that the people who know the business best drift furthest from it.

Published: 2026-11-12 · Updated: 2026-11-10 · Topics: Digital Transformation, Team Building & Culture, AI & Machine Learning, Spending without return · Author: Alan Wizemann

When I am asked where the biggest financial opportunity usually hides in a company that is not performing the way it should, the honest answer is that it is a combination of things. There is almost always revenue being left on the table, and there is almost always money being spent without much to show for it. But when I trace both of those back far enough, I end up in the same place nearly every time, which is the way the organization has grown, and the reflex most companies have when they get bigger.

That reflex is very human and very predictable. More work shows up, so you add people (usually good ones). More people need managing, so you add a layer. Jobs get split into narrower and narrower pieces, each with a clear owner and a clear handoff, because that feels like control. Every one of those decisions is defensible when it is made, and none of them looks like bloat at the time. It is only when you step back and look at the whole that you see what has happened, which is that a growing share of the company's effort is now spent coordinating work rather than doing it.

The cost that worries me most is not the salary line, although that is real. It is what happens to the people who actually understand the business. Every company has them: the person who knows the customer better than any research report, the one who can tell you why a supply chain decision from years ago still causes problems every holiday season, the product person who has watched how people really use the thing. In a lean company those people are close to the work, and their judgment shows up directly in what gets built and sold. As layers accumulate, they get pulled away from it, promoted into managing, routed into meetings, or simply buried under enough process that their knowledge has to travel through three or four translations before it reaches a decision. Somewhere along the way, the autonomy that made them valuable gets quietly taken away.

You can usually find these people, if you look, by a slightly unflattering label the organization has given them. They are the "complainers." They can see that there is a better way to do the work, they say so, and they do not have the power or the autonomy to do anything about it, so they become known as the people who are never satisfied. In my experience, a great many of them are rock stars who are simply on the wrong team, or in the wrong role, or optimized for something other than their strengths. And very often the ideas that would actually transform the business are sitting with them already, ignored, because there is no path from where they sit to where decisions get made.

So when I come into a company, removing that kind of organizational bloat is one of the first things I look at, and I want to be careful about what I mean by it. It is not a headcount exercise, and it is certainly not about treating people as the problem. It is about asking, team by team, how far the people who know the most are from the work that matters most, and then shortening that distance: smaller, durable teams built around a real business problem, with the domain experts inside them rather than reporting into them from a distance, and with enough autonomy to act on what they know.

What has made this feel much more urgent recently is that the economics of the coordination layer are changing underneath every company at once. A great deal of what those middle layers exist to do – translating between departments, moving information from one box to another, turning a decision into a plan and a plan into a set of tickets – is precisely the work that AI is getting very good at. That does not mean the people go away. I have written about this at more length in the thesis section of this site, but the short version is that the person often does not change; the job does. The people whose work was coordination and translation are, in many cases, exactly the people with the deep domain knowledge the new model most needs, if we can move them back toward the work instead of further from it.

That is the opportunity I find most exciting, and also the one most companies are likely to miss, because the instinct when a new technology arrives is to layer it on top of the existing structure, which usually just makes the bloat faster. The better move, I think, is to use the moment to ask the question we should have been asking all along, about who in the company actually understands the business and how we got so good at keeping them away from it.

If you want a place to start, look for the complainers. In my experience they are rarely wrong about the problem, and they are usually the ones who already know how to fix it.

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Canonical: https://alanwizemann.com/articles/bloat-takes-the-experts-away-from-the-work