"I don't have to know how what I tell you to do fits into the overall flow of what you want to accomplish between multiple different teams. That's your problem, go talk to all the different teams you have to work with to get approvals and figure it out yourself, that's not my problem."
"I acknowledge absolutely nothing has changed, and I will never use what you create, but format A has changed to format B because everything new is in format B, and thus you must spend time to re-create everything in format B so everything in my filing system is consistent."
"Yes, this is recording the information twice in two different ways. By hand. And with no enforcement to keep it up to date. But I'm only measured on recording the information, and as long as Number Go Up on the recordings, it is not my problem."
"Yes, the new form has not been published. Yes, the new requirement for these approvals have not been put into existing processes that take months to grind out a decision, much less the processes debugged. But in six months, everyone must follow what we publish in several months leaving only two months for you to implement in 3-4 months a new, untried process. No, we will not talk about this possibly creating a bottleneck and exacerbating the flow, that won't happen."
If there was a chargeback of effort to this kind of mindset and decisions, then a different political battle would emerge, but at least it would make these kinds of unilateral, unaccountable decisions in their aggregate form visible to the organization. A tremendous amount of this friction goes away if organizations had the capacity to automate many processes, but the cost hurdle is currently too high for most organizations. I'm hopeful LLM's in the hands of non-technical staff can mitigate that, but I'm likely dangerously naive there.