When efficiency meets bureaucracy: Lessons from Philip K. Howard and a real-world M&A

In The Death of Common Sense, Philip K. Howard describes a world in which rules, originally created to protect fairness, gradually expand into a maze of procedures that suffocate initiative. Over time, bureaucracy becomes a force that disconnects people from judgment and strips them of accountability. Instead of asking, What is the right decision? Individuals begin to ask, What does the rule allow? Howard shows how this shift drains energy from institutions and replaces clarity with compliance.

Over the past months, as we integrated a large corporate legacy structure into Ignite, I watched Howard’s ideas come to life in the day-to-day mechanics of a real organization. It is one thing to read about bureaucracy as a theoretical challenge; it is quite another to feel the weight of it inside a business that must operate with velocity and scale to succeed. When a smaller, leaner company acquires a business built inside a global corporate environment, you quickly realize that you aren’t only integrating systems and assets, you are integrating mindsets.

This is the part of M&A that no financial model captures. On paper, the assets may be straightforward. In practice, you are bringing together two completely different philosophies of how work gets done.

How bureaucracy slowly replaces judgment

When we took on the ENGIE Energy Access business, one of the first realities we encountered was the sheer depth of process that had accumulated within the organization. These processes were built over years, often for good reasons, but they had grown into a dense structure of approvals, committees, compliance reviews, mandatory workflows, reporting cycles, and inherited governance lines. Every step had a checkpoint; every decision had an additional layer; every initiative required documentation to satisfy several different stakeholders.

The individuals inside this system were not the problem. Many are talented, dedicated, and determined to contribute meaningfully. But the system they operated in had conditioned them to prioritize caution over initiative. It had taught them that following procedure was the safest path, even when it slowed outcomes. Howard describes this as the quiet erosion of responsibility. When everyone must approve a decision, no one truly owns it. When the process becomes the priority, the purpose gets lost.

Ignite, by contrast, was built in the last mile of Africa, where speed is not optional, and scale is the goal. Our work depends on real-time decision-making, on people taking clear ownership, on lean processes, on data that drives daily actions, and on teams empowered to solve problems without waiting for permission from three time zones away. Efficiency is part of our identity because inefficiency has real human costs for the customers we serve.

So when our culture of speed met a culture shaped by decades of inherited corporate process, the collision was immediate. Not confrontational, but unmistakable. Two entirely different operating logics were suddenly expected to move as one. We had a model built around decisive action, coming together with a model built around procedural safety. One was designed to remove friction; the other had learned to absorb it.

This was the moment when Howard’s work felt almost prophetic. Bureaucratic systems do not simply slow things down — they shape how people see themselves. They reduce a person’s sense of agency and gradually chip away at their belief that they are empowered to act. After years inside such systems, employees don’t resist efficiency because they don’t believe in it; they resist it because they have been taught that initiative carries risk. The first step of integration, therefore, wasn’t operational; it was psychological.

Rebuilding agency

As we moved through the integration, the work became helping people rediscover their own judgment. It meant reminding them that they were not just allowed to make decisions—they were expected to. It required giving responsibility back to individuals who had been surrounded for years by structures designed to dilute it. You cannot tell someone to “be efficient” when the environment they come from punished efficiency at every turn; you must help them unlearn the assumptions that bureaucracy quietly built into their thinking.

Throughout this process, we had to redefine what accountability meant inside the combined organization. In a lean system, accountability is empowerment. It is the clarity that comes when you know what outcome you are responsible for and that you have the authority to deliver it. When a team used to multi-layer approvals discovers that they can make a decision in a day instead of a month, it changes not only their workflow but their identity. It reconnects them with the purpose of the work.

Equally important was simplifying processes so they served outcomes rather than overshadowed them. Efficiency is not the absence of structure; it is the intelligent use of structure. Too many organizations confuse control with layers, as though adding steps somehow produces better results. In reality, layers add distance from customers, purpose, and meaningful results. Removing unnecessary steps is not about cutting corners; it is about clearing the path to agility and scope.

As the integration progressed, we saw the transformation take hold. People who once hesitated to move began taking initiative. Teams that waited for approvals began taking ownership. Decisions that previously paused for committee reviews started happening in the rhythm required by real-world operations. You could feel the organization becoming lighter, more confident, and more aligned with the realities of the markets we serve.

This, in the end, was the real integration. It was not the merging of systems or processes; it was the merging of mental models. It was helping people shift from a world where they asked what the process permitted to a world where they asked what the mission required. Howard’s lesson is that bureaucracy is both an administrative challenge and a cultural one. It shapes human behavior. And the antidote is not simply new procedures but a return to common sense, judgment, trust, and responsibility.

In that sense, bringing efficiency into a legacy corporate structure was not about speed alone. It was about restoring purpose. It was about helping people reconnect with the reason the organization exists in the first place. Ignite’s mission, to bring affordable, reliable energy to millions across the Global South, cannot be achieved inside a structure that values checklist compliance over meaningful progress.

Efficiency, for us, is a moral obligation. Every delay has a cost measured in the opportunities denied to people who live without electricity, and every unnecessary layer pushes us further from the customers we aim to serve.

Howard wrote about bureaucracy killing common sense. Integration work showed me that reviving common sense, reviving ownership, judgment, and accountability, is one of the most important things a leader can accomplish during an M&A. Efficiency is not the enemy of structure; it is the enemy of unnecessary structure. The systems matter. The processes matter. But ultimately, the transformation succeeds when people rediscover their agency.

And when they do, speed, scale, and impact follow.

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