After securing a second round of funding from the President’s Community Fund, the next challenge began: obtaining approval from Imperial College’s Estate and Property Board.
We learned during our first round of funding that this process could take months, and that progress could easily stall if even one stakeholder became a bottleneck. This second round proved to be just as challenging.
Bureaucracy versus Entrepreneurship
Like many large institutions, Imperial College operates multiple arcane layers of bureaucracy, approval processes, and compliance requirements. These systems exist for a good reason. They help the institution control risk, provide accountability and avoid shopping list of issues, whether they be legal, financial, or reputational.
For entrepreneurs, however, these systems can feel restrictive. Startups thrive in laissez-faire ecosystems that allow for rapid experimentation, quick decision-making, and continuous iteration. Long approval cycles can interrupt this momentum, delaying the learning feedback process that innovation thrives on.
This tension is a common source of complaint from tech entrepreneurs. Compared with the United States, both the European Union and the United Kingdom have historically adopted a more interventionist approach to regulation. While these regulations are intended to protect workers and consumers, they also throttle innovation by increasing costs and complexity for early stage startups.
However, I believe this framing misses an important point. Like the rules of a board game, regulations are not simply barriers. Designing products that successfully satisfy more demanding regulations can often produce solutions that are more reliable, durable, and commercially valuable.
Therefore, the best entrepreneurs do not necessarily avoid bureaucracy, but rather learn how to navigate it effectively to maintain the speed required for innovation.
Universities and large corporations provide an excellent training ground for developing these skills. Innovating within an institution, often called intrapreneurship, teaches entrepreneurs how to operate within complex systems before they encounter similar challenges in industry.
Examining Processes using Systems Thinking
Systems thinking provides a useful way of understanding bureaucratic processes.
Any process can be viewed as a sequence of stages connected by actions that move the project from one stage to the next. This perspective is valuable in project management because it allows leaders to map an entire workflow, identify costs, allocate resources, and estimate project timelines.
In startups, many processes are informal and evolve over time. In contrast, bureaucratic organisations typically rely on well-defined procedures with established approval pathways, which can be analysed as systems whose behaviour can be understood and optimised.
Of course, organisational processes are not always fully documented. Some are informal, while others exist only in the minds of long-serving staff members. As a result, building an accurate process map often requires asking questions, identifying decision-makers, and gradually uncovering how work actually flows through the organisation.
Understanding these processes takes time, but can offer opportunities to optimize your project, using techniques like the Rate Determining Step Framework.
RDS Framework
The Rate Determining Step is a concept from chemistry.
Chemical reactions rarely occur in a single step. They usually consist of smaller reactions that transition between stages. Chemists have observed that one of these steps is often significantly slower than the others. Since every subsequent step depends on this slowest reaction, it determines the overall time it takes to complete the whole process.
The same principle applies to organisational workflows.
Suppose a process consists of a sequence of activities:
C₁ → C₂ → C₃ → … → Cₙ
where each activity requires time:
T₁, T₂, T₃ … Tₙ
If one activity, Cⱼ, is substantially longer than every other, then the total completion time of the entire process is approximately equal to the time required to complete that single step. In other words, total time ≈ Tⱼ.
Designing a Process Around the Rate Determining Step
The framework provides us with a practical planning strategy.
To start with, you should reduce the time it takes to complete every activity until the overall timeline is dominated by one unavoidable bottleneck, the Rate Determining Step.
Operational tasks generally fall into two categories:
- Internal tasks: controlled by you or your team, and
- External tasks: controlled by another department, committee, or stakeholder.
Internal tasks are usually the easiest to optimise. Documents can be drafted, budgets prepared, and supporting evidence assembled in advance before the process begins. By completing this work ahead of time, internal steps become almost instantaneous once the project starts.
External tasks are more difficult to optimise because they depend on other people. However, delays are often caused less by complexity than by a lack of priority.
To improve these transitions, you can use another simple framework.
Three Ps Framework
When handing work to a third party, you can maximise the probability of a timely response by focusing on three principles:
- Precision: Clearly define what needs to be delivered, including the expected format and success criteria, who is responsible, and when the task is due.
- Prioritisation: Communicate the importance and urgency of the task so that it receives appropriate attention.
- Persistence: Follow up regularly. Well-timed reminders prevent work from disappearing into busy inboxes or being bumped by competing priorities.
These practices won’t eliminate external delays, but they can significantly reduce the likelihood that unnecessary waiting becomes a serious bottleneck.
Applying Systems Thinking at Imperial
Imperial’s Post-Award Management Board reviews Estate and Property projects funded outside the department’s normal budget. Preparing to meet with the Board required us to convert our funding proposal into the College’s standard Project Initiation Document.
From our previous experience, we knew that committee review would almost certainly become the rate-determining step because it required the board to consult with multiple stakeholders. Therefore, for the Rate Determining Step framework to apply I pre-wrote the Project Initiation Document before the intended day of submission so that when funding was confirmed the submission could happen instantly.
Although the committee review still required considerable time, eliminating delays at every other stage ensured that the unavoidable board review process, not our own lack of preparation, determined the overall timeline.
The bottom line
By leveraging systems thinking to map operational processes, you can identify friction points and optimise each step of your project work flow to reduce unnecessary delays. Following this approach allowed us to secure approval in a timely manner within the highly bureaucratic environment of Imperial University.
Bureaucracy is often viewed as the opposite of entrepreneurship. In reality, it is simply another complex system to be managed.
The goal is not to eliminate bureaucracy, but rather to understand it well enough so that it no longer poses insurmountable obstacle.
Emilio Garcia Padron is an MSc Applied Mathematics student at Imperial College London, specializing in Computational Dynamical Systems. He is a full-stack software developer and founder of NEA Studios. He is also a founder of RE:GEN @ Imperial, a project aiming to protect and expand Green Spaces on Imperial grounds that raised over £39,000 in funding.
Image: DALL-E
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