The cursor blinks. It’s been blinking for what feels like an eternity on field number 12 of 22. ‘Justification for Expedited Review.’ Raman stares at it, his jaw tight. The code change is already written. It’s two lines. A simple, elegant fix for a minor memory leak that nobody else caught, a leak that would eventually cost the company about $272 a day in cloud-spend inefficiencies. It took him 12 minutes to diagnose and 2 minutes to fix.

He has now been in this Jira ticket for 42 minutes.

He has to select a ‘Risk Profile’ from a dropdown menu whose options were clearly written by someone who has never shipped code. He has to link to a ‘Governing Epic’ that doesn’t exist for this kind of maintenance. He has to tag at least two ‘Stakeholder Groups,’ even though the only stakeholder is the server itself, which is currently, quietly, bleeding money.

It’s a system designed to treat a senior surgeon with 22 years of experience like a first-year intern who can’t be trusted with a scalpel. He was hired for his expertise, the very thing this process is designed to sand down, to file away, to make irrelevant.

The great, unspoken truth of modern corporate life is that companies don’t actually want experts. They want expertise, but they want it captured, bottled, and turned into a checklist. They hire you for your resume-for the demonstrated history of incredible judgment, insight, and skill-and then they hand you a system that actively prevents you from using any of it. They want a predictable, interchangeable cog.

I Built These Cages

I say this with the metallic taste of blood in my mouth-I bit my tongue earlier, a stupid, clumsy accident-and the even worse taste of hypocrisy. Because I’ve built these cages. A few years ago, I was tasked with ‘standardizing the creative briefing process’ at an agency. We had this one brilliant, chaotic strategist. Let’s call him Leo. Leo’s briefs were masterpieces of insight and provocation. They were also inconsistent. Sometimes they were a single paragraph in an email; sometimes they were a 12-page deck filled with memes and screenshots from obscure films. But they always, without a doubt, led to incredible work. Management, however, saw him as a risk. A ‘key-person dependency.’

So I made the cage. A beautiful, elegant cage. A 42-field web form with mandatory sections for ‘Audience Psychographics,’ ‘Key Mandatories,’ ‘Brand Pillars,’ and ‘Competitive SWOT.’ It was a work of art. It was logical. It was defensible. It generated predictable, uniform, and utterly mediocre briefs. It neutered Leo. He lasted another six months, his frustration palpable, his work a shadow of its former self. He filled out the fields with a kind of malicious compliance, his genius suffocated by dropdown menus. He left to start his own consultancy.

We celebrated the successful implementation of our new, predictable process.

This isn’t about being anti-process.

Guardrail, Not a Straitjacket

Process is essential. Checklists save lives in stickpits and operating rooms. But those processes are built to augment expertise, not replace it. A pilot’s pre-flight checklist ensures they don’t forget to check the flaps under pressure; it doesn’t tell them how to handle a microburst at 2,000 feet. It’s a guardrail, not a straitjacket.

The corporate processes hamstringing people like Raman aren’t guardrails; they are assembly lines designed for people who have never seen the materials before. They are designed for the lowest common denominator, and in doing so, they drag everyone down to it.

Take my friend, Sage M.K. She’s a bankruptcy attorney, and she’s one of those people whose brain seems to operate on a different frequency. Within the first two minutes of a client call, she can absorb a torrent of panicked, disjointed information about creditors, assets, and LLCs and immediately identify the one tiny point of leverage that will define the entire case. It’s a form of professional clairvoyance built on 22 years of experience. Her firm, in a fit of efficiency, recently onboarded a new ‘Client Journey Management’ software. Now, before she can offer a single piece of advice, she has to walk every new client through a 192-field questionnaire. The system can’t proceed until every box is checked. She finds herself saying things like, “I understand your entire business is collapsing, but I need to know the exact date you incorporated your Delaware C-Corp before we can move to the next screen.” The system prevents her from getting to the heart of the matter. It forces her to ignore her own expert instincts, the very thing the client is paying an exorbitant hourly rate for.

When you’re constantly forced to follow a script, you forget how to improvise. You lose faith in your own instincts because the system provides no room for them. This creates a state of learned helplessness. The best people, the Ramans and Leos and Sages, grow frustrated and leave. They go somewhere they can stretch, somewhere their judgment is valued. And who remains? The people who are comfortable within the cage. The people for whom the process is a welcome substitute for terrifying professional autonomy.

The organization doesn’t just lose its experts; it selects for compliance. Over time, the entire company’s metabolism slows down. It becomes less adaptable, less innovative, less alive. The de-skilling of the individual becomes the de-skilling of the organization.

The Insidious Spreadsheet

The insidious part is that it all looks like progress on a spreadsheet. Process adherence is at 92%. Ticket-completion times are standardized. Variability is down. But the unquantifiable metric-the game-changing insight, the 10x productivity burst from an unencumbered expert-has vanished. The organization is now predictably, efficiently, and irrevocably mediocre.

You have to find an arena, separate from your work, where you can exercise your expertise without apology. A place to make decisions, face consequences, and sharpen your instincts on your own terms. For a developer like Raman, it might be contributing to a complex open-source project. For a strategist, it could be pro-bono work for a non-profit. For someone learning to trust their judgment in financial markets, it might be a paper trading simulator for stocks that lets them test their theses without the bureaucratic drag of a compliance department. It’s about creating a space where your brain, not a process, is the primary tool.

I made a mistake with Leo. I saw his variability as a problem to be solved, not a strength to be harnessed. My obsession with a clean, predictable system cost the company a true original. The system I built wasn’t wrong, exactly-it was just applied with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. It was a tool for amateurs forced upon a master. I was so focused on creating a safety net that I didn’t realize I had built a ceiling, just a few feet off the ground. We ended up with 232 pages of documentation for a process that produced nothing of value.

And that’s the real tragedy. These expert-proofing systems aren’t just frustrating for the people within them; they are profoundly damaging to the organizations that deploy them. They are an autoimmune disease, where the body’s defenses mistake a vital organ for a threat and slowly, methodically, shut it down.

The cursor blinks. Raman sighs, cracks his knuckles, and starts typing into field number 12. He writes a bland, jargon-filled sentence that will satisfy the process, a sentence that bears no resemblance to the elegant, intuitive leap of logic that led to his two-line fix. He is translating his expertise into a language the system can understand.