The law of unintended consequences is doing a real number on the productivity of advice firms right now.
I’m at the coalface of this every week, and I can tell you that while the models like to blame a general lack of investment or ‘red tape’, the reality is often much sillier.
We are wasting massive amounts of effort managing legislative changes that were never meant to touch the things they’re now breaking.
Take Australian Privacy Principle 8.
It was likely written to ensure our data wasn’t sitting on a server in a country nefarious to our interests. Fair enough. But the practical fallout?
It’s created a massive bottleneck in how firms use AI. Unless you’re using Microsoft, most AI providers won’t guarantee your data stays in Australian data centres. So, everyone is funnelled toward Copilot.
The problem is, Copilot isn’t always the best tool for the job, and it’s certainly not the easiest to set up if you aren’t a global enterprise. It’s heavy, it’s complex, and it requires a level of admin that most small firms just aren’t geared for.
The cost of a ‘simple’ request
I saw this recently with a client. They wanted a simple meeting booking process—a page, some rules, and an automatic recording that the team could access later.
Because they use an outsourced IT provider and don’t have admin access to their own back end, they were quoted $220 an hour for six to eight hours of work to get it moving.
I’m no Microsoft expert, but that’s surely a two-hour job. Maximum.
We’ve ended up with a system so complex it’s essentially charging a ‘friction tax’ on basic efficiency.
You want to save ten minutes a day? Great, that’ll be $1,500 in consulting fees and a month of back-and-forth emails first.
Why complex systems collapse
John Gall, a paediatrician who wrote a brilliant book called Systemantics, argued that complex systems only ever evolve from simple ones.
He noted that complex systems started from scratch almost always exist in a state of imminent collapse.
When we engineer overly complex rules of operation—whether that’s at a federal level or inside your own office—we’re just building a bigger engine for unintended consequences.
The lesson for me has become simple (literally): keep it functional before you get difficult.
If you try to build the ‘perfect’ complex system on day one, you usually end up paying others big bucks to fix the leaks. It’s the same with your operating model. If the workflow is a mess, throwing a high-end enterprise tool at it just makes the mess more expensive to manage.
Finding the leverage
Most firms I talk to don’t actually have a tech problem; they have an operating system problem.
They’re looking for a shiny new software fix when what they really need is to clarify how work flows from one desk to the next.
You don’t scale by hiring faster or buying more ‘glue’ to hold your apps together. You scale by designing a business that executes the same way every single week.
If you’re feeling that friction—where every small improvement feels like a massive project—it’s worth stepping back and looking at the roles and the flow before you sign another software contract.
Usually, the biggest gains don’t come from the new tech, but from removing the admin that’s been pretending to be ‘client service’.
If you want to pressure-test your current model and map out a few moves that actually move the needle, you should book a Practice Growth Session. We can take 30 minutes to figure out where the friction is actually coming from.
Alternatively, if you want to see where your capacity is leaking right now, you can run a Capacity & Profit Diagnostic. It’s a good way to get some data behind those ‘gut feel’ frustrations.
