My ability to do work is explicitly constrained by management mismanagement and randomness, but that’s the one sacred cow we can’t discuss in this dynamic. And yet, my org has been drifting towards this “hard line” too.
"Sometimes there are areas to make progress [where] you have three people making decisions, understanding that and bringing it down to two or one improves efficiency by 20%."
The difference being that more people means slower motion but with enough mass, molasses is pretty speedy (estimated 35 mph in linked article).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
And I'm only being somewhat facetious when I claim we need more molasses-like leadership: normally slow us down and make us think about things but if there's momentum, pull out the stops and let's go!
We try to manage to slow things down regardless of the scale or the purpose, and that's where (pun intended) molasses has us licked.