Sarah Tucker: How to Start a Revolution and End Up in HR

Sarah Tucker

The young entrepreneur who promises to destroy bureaucracy should probably be photographed at that moment, because within five years the same person may be explaining why an employee needs permission from three colleagues to spend forty pounds, while describing this development as growing up. Revolutions acquire administrative departments with astonishing speed, particularly once the revolutionary discovers that trusting people involves the unsettling possibility that they might do something differently.

The interesting issue is less whether government should be bigger or smaller than why intelligent people create systems they would consider intolerable if somebody else were running them. Young entrepreneurs are encouraged to challenge established organisations, but rather less often encouraged to examine the pleasure they themselves derive from being established, consulted and occasionally deferred to by somebody who would prefer to get on with their work.

Bureaucracy frequently begins with an entirely reasonable wish to prevent an unpleasant experience from happening again, which gives it an emotional advantage over the person suggesting that perhaps everyone could calm down. One expensive mistake produces an approval stage, one awkward customer produces a reporting requirement, and one employee’s poor judgement removes discretion from everybody, including the people whose judgement had been saving the company money.

Each measure arrives with a convincing explanation, while their combined effect resembles a house whose successive owners have installed so many security systems that reaching the kitchen constitutes suspicious activity. The tragedy is that everyone can explain their own contribution, nobody feels responsible for the whole experience, and the customer eventually leaves, having discovered that the company’s commitment to responsiveness requires considerable patience from the person awaiting a response.

This is where polymathy becomes commercially useful rather than merely an elaborate explanation for having too many interests, because understanding a business requires more than understanding its separate functions. An accountant notices the cost of an error, a psychologist notices the behaviour a control mechanism encourages, a designer notices the obstruction it creates, and a novelist wonders why the person who caused the problem has vanished from the subsequent account.

A young founder needs those perspectives in conversation, although acquiring four degrees before selling sandwiches would make lunch unnecessarily expensive and possibly unavailable until middle age. The skill lies in recognising that expertise illuminates part of a problem, while wisdom includes noticing the surrounding darkness, particularly when the expert explaining the solution has no responsibility for the people who must subsequently live with it.

Consider Companies House identity verification, which became a legal requirement in November 2025, beginning a twelve-month transition for existing directors and people with significant control. Establishing whether somebody controlling a company exists is a defensible ambition for a corporate register, although one imagines the less scrupulous applicant experiencing this development as an unwelcome attack on a previously accommodating business model.

The entrepreneurial question is how effectively that purpose is achieved, how clearly the process is explained, and how much avoidable work falls upon the legitimate owner already chasing invoices and answering customers. Calling every requirement interference is intellectually lazy, but treating every additional requirement as progress gives the same laziness a more respectable wardrobe, together with an impressive vocabulary for explaining why the website cannot currently help.

The proposed abolition of NHS England offers another distinction worth carrying into business, because moving responsibilities elsewhere is different from establishing that those responsibilities no longer need performing. The government’s published plans describe functions transferring into the Department of Health and Social Care and other arrangements, making the meaningful test what happens to decisions and accountability, rather than whether a familiar name eventually disappears from the stationery.

Businesses attempt their own versions when they remove a management position, distribute its responsibilities among already exhausted colleagues and announce an efficiency gain because the exhaustion now appears under several different headings. Equally, another manager may release skilled people to do valuable work, which is why counting employees without understanding relationships can produce such impressively confident nonsense, especially when the presentation has already been booked.

What fascinates me is how quickly founders become attached to arrangements they once despised, particularly when those arrangements protect their own authority and arrive accompanied by the reassuring word necessary. Having launched a business to escape pointless hierarchy, they discover that autonomy remains an excellent principle until someone exercises it without consulting them, whereupon independence acquires conditions that were somehow absent from the inspirational launch speech.

Beneath this sits the uncomfortable possibility that the qualities we most vigorously condemn in institutions include qualities we have not recognised in ourselves, especially our appetite for control, recognition and exemption. The entrepreneur who despises status games may simply prefer a game in which their own attributes confer status, while the founder demanding transparency may become unexpectedly protective of privacy when somebody asks about their expenses.

Fighting an organisation can also become such a consuming identity that the challenger borrows its habits, guards’ territory, discourages dissent and begins treating personal survival as a public service. A company therefore needs a purpose that survives the disappearance of its original enemy, because resentment supplies considerable energy but makes a temperamental employer, especially when an ordinary disagreement is interpreted as disloyalty to the revolution.

Values become useful here, provided they govern decisions rather than decorate walls, since almost any organisation can print integrity beside a coffee machine and leave the machine to demonstrate consistency. The revealing moment comes when honesty delays investment, fairness reduces a margin, or the employee raising a legitimate concern happens to be somebody the founder finds profoundly irritating, which is an excellent test of principle.

A value that never costs anything may be sincerely held, but it has not yet been required to carry much weight, rather like expensive walking boots that have only encountered restaurant carpets. Young entrepreneurs need to decide which costs they will accept before the difficult moment arrives, when an accommodating adviser will almost certainly explain why circumstances make this exception both unavoidable and commercially mature.

Technology adds another temptation, since businesses can now generate policies, presentations and internal communications at a speed once requiring several departments and a protracted disagreement over fonts. The danger is that producing material becomes easier than deciding whether anybody needs it, allowing a company to develop the documentary habits of a multinational before establishing whether its customers want another version of the product.

Before automating a process, a founder might ask whether it deserves to survive, since making an unnecessary task faster can resemble innovation most convincingly from the supplier’s side of the invoice. Giving internal rules expiry dates would also help, alongside an explanation of the problem each addresses and evidence that it still exists, rather than assuming that everything introduced during a crisis deserves permanent accommodation.

This makes simplicity an ethical choice as well as a commercial one, because complexity usually transfers effort towards the person with the least power to refuse it. When a customer must telephone repeatedly, or a junior employee must decode an instruction nobody senior can clarify, the organisation has saved itself trouble by exporting it to somebody whose time it considers less valuable than its own, usually without asking permission.

Another useful exercise is following one customer request through the whole business, observing where information repeats itself, responsibility evaporates, and perfectly pleasant employees begin defending decisions they cannot explain. Moving between numbers, language, behaviour and design makes those connections visible, while reminding the founder that the spreadsheet records certain consequences extremely well and remains remarkably incurious about several others, including whether anybody would willingly return.

Having worked across writing, broadcasting, education and business, I have become interested in what happens between professional languages, especially when everyone appears to agree while understanding something different. A young entrepreneur’s advantage should be the freedom to examine those assumptions before they harden into company tradition, because the eventual test of their revolution is whether it gives people room to think, or merely changes whose permission they require.

Sarah Tucker is the biographer of the pioneering thinker Edward de Bono, who developed the concept of lateral thinking. Her books Size Six, Seven and Eight form a trilogy for readers aged 7–12, inviting them to use lateral thinking to solve mysteries.