Bringing back Eisenhower's process for getting rid of process

Governance Cybernetics

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Bringing back Eisenhower's process for getting rid of process<br>The Bureau of the Budget’s 1945 toolkit, rebuilt to live in the browser.

Dave Deek, F. Ichiro Gifford, and Kevin Hawickhorst<br>Jul 09, 2026

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F. Ichiro Gifford had an emergency peak-load program drowning in seven sign-off emails. It was bad. He sat down with a blank Excel, walked the procedure end to end, tagged every step, and cut the thing nearly in half. No reorg, no new headcount, no dashboard. A chart and an afternoon.<br>That is not a new trick. It is a very old one we forgot.<br>In 1942 the Bureau of the Budget had the same set of problems everyone has: too much work, not enough people, procedures nobody had read in years. It did not freeze hiring, talent was scarce in wartime, and it did not redraw the org chart. It taught a handful of managers to find the wasted motion in their own offices and cut it out. Workshops, manuals, and a run of good propaganda posters. While that program and others like it were running, public trust in government sat near 80 percent. We are not claiming the one produced the other. We are claiming they kept company.<br>A few writers besides us, Kevin Hawickhorst at State Capacitance and F. Ichiro Gifford at Energy Crystals, have written about the uncomfortable version of this history. Government workers back then were not more talented or harder-working. They were managed better. Reforms shipped as pilots before they scaled. Then the corporate management fashions of the 1960s and 70s came in and undid it. Kevin put it best: “Politicians had better dashboards in the era of punch cards than we have in the era of AI.”<br>So why not bring it back?<br>Work Simplification App<br>The method, in a nutshell

Each tool asks a few blunt questions.<br>The Process Chart asks what the steps really are. You walk a procedure end to end and tag every step: operation, move, inspection, delay, storage. Laid out in order, the waste shows itself. The four approvals that should be one. The form keyed in twice. The wait nobody owns. This is what Ichiro ran against Peak Shredder, and his line is the one the whole thing is built on: “Operational staff don’t need dictums. We need tools. ”

The Work Distribution Chart asks who does what, and for how long. People across the top, work down the side, hours in the cells. It does not flatter anyone. It is how you catch the director still reviewing rebates by hand while the strategy goes unwritten. Ichiro thinks this is a great way to sniff out “ex-analyst syndrome,” the affliction of managers who didn’t give up their old job when they got promoted.

The Work Count asks whether the volume justifies the machinery. It is the numbers under the process, and they are usually smaller than the apparatus built to handle them.

Behind the three is the Functional File , the one place the forms, scripts, and templates actually live. The Bureau got so good at this that private businesses asked the federal government to teach them the same approach.

Nobody trains the people who run things

Activist movements train organizers and judges. MBAs lean on organizational strategy, which is more glamorous but not relevant to improving domain-specific processes. And many managers were pressed into service without even a seminar. Nobody trains the official who has to make the city run : the one who geotags every bus stop so the next storm does not kill anyone, or who counts the six thousand small-business rules that piled up while no one was looking. The craft is teachable, and almost no one teaches it. You cannot have an imagination for what a system feels like from inside it if you have never been inside one.<br>Luckily (for you, not us), Kevin, Ichiro, and I have done our time inside the machine. So we built something to put the craft back in reach, and to get people into the same room to learn it in person.<br>What we built

Work Simplification is a free, installable web app. It is the 1945 toolkit on your computer, nothing more.<br>A Process Chart with the operation, move, inspect, delay, and store symbols, severity stamps, bottleneck flags, and a Before/After view, so the cut you are proposing sits next to what it replaces. A Work Distribution Chart mapping people against steps, with friction marked. A Work Count for the derived numbers, and a Functional File for the paperwork a process runs on. A Field Manual that explains each move in plain English, and a Team view for the people doing the work.<br>It opens on a pack chooser. Pick a world to start in, or take an empty desk. One of the worlds is recreation of the utility energy services desk F. Ichiro Gifford cut his teeth in, so you can take the tools apart on a real process before you point them at your own.<br>Two choices were deliberate. It looks like a 1945 government pamphlet, stencil type and rubber-stamp verdicts included, a reminder that this is recovered craft and not a...