Nudge not Sludge

Every approval step in your business started as a good idea.

Someone got burned, so you added a sign-off. A mistake slipped through, so you built a checklist. Each addition made sense at the time. Then a few years passed, and the approval that once protected you became the thing your team works around to get anything done.

There is a name for this. Richard Thaler, who shared the Nobel Prize in economics, calls it “sludge”. In his 2018 Science editorial “Nudge, not sludge,” he draws a clear line: a nudge makes the right action easier; sludge makes it harder. Same intent, opposite effect. Most sludge is not designed. It accumulates over time, one control at a time, until a five-minute task carries fifteen minutes of friction that everyone dreads.

You already know where yours lives. The expense process people dread. The onboarding that takes three weeks longer than it should. The report everyone fills out, and nobody reads.

You do not have to fix all of it. Mapping every process in the business is the fastest way to do nothing, because the list is always too long to start.

So do not start with the list. Start with one. Pick the process your team complains about most, and ask a simpler question than usual: what was this built to prevent, and does it still prevent it? Strip out one step that no longer earns its place.

One cleaned-up process is better than none attempted. The momentum this builds may end up surprising you. Get one done. Take the win.

Thanks for reading,
Sarah