Your organisation is a battery. What is draining it?

Look at a typical week in your organisation. How many hours actually go towards what the team exists for — producing, creating, serving clients? And how many are absorbed by coordination meetings, political arbitrations, cascading approvals, and unresolved latent conflicts?

Eric Berne, the Swiss psychiatrist known for Transactional Analysis, formulated before his death a less-known but equally powerful theory: the Organisational Theory of Berne, or T.O.B. One of its fundamental laws is blunt: the energy of a group is finite. It obeys a conservation principle. And it divides between two flows competing for the same resource.

Activity and Process: the two flows that share energy

The T.O.B. distinguishes two types of organisational energy.

Activity energy goes directly towards the group's reason for being: production, value created for the client, measurable results. It is what the organisation exists for.

Process energy is what the group devotes to keeping itself operational: coordination rituals, relationship management, conflicts, internal politics, power games. Process is not useless — without it, the organisation disintegrates. But it is costly.

Berne's law is simple: the higher the Process energy, the less remains for Activity. This is not a metaphor. It is a measurable reality: every hour spent resolving a conflict between two managers is one hour not devoted to the client. Every weekly reporting meeting is energy not invested in production.

« A high-performing organisation is not one without conflicts, but one that resolves them without permanently diverting energy from its core purpose. »

— Eric Berne, Organisational Theory

The critical ratio: why 70/30 and not 50/50

The T.O.B. does not say Process is bad. It says it must remain within reasonable proportions. The optimal ratio identified by T.O.B. practitioners is roughly 70% energy towards Activity and 30% towards Process.

Below 30% Process, the organisation lacks cohesion: relationships deteriorate, conflicts are never addressed, individuals become isolated. Above 50% Process, it spins on itself: meetings talk about meetings, managers manage managers, processes serve processes.

Yet in most large organisations, especially after rapid growth or restructuring, the ratio tips. Some teams devote more than 50% of their energy to pure Process: arbitrations, multiple approvals, internal reporting, interface management. Real production is reduced accordingly, without anyone having decided it, and without anyone truly measuring it.

What consumes your Process energy without your knowing

The most costly energy leaks are rarely spectacular. They are diffuse, daily, and become invisible because everyone has grown accustomed to them.

Meetings that end without a decision are the most common leak. They consume Process energy without producing anything for Activity. Chronic unresolved conflicts are another: a disagreement between two departments that no one dares to arbitrate costs months of collective energy, in bilateral meetings, coalition games, and strategic caution.

Governance ambiguities are a third major source: when it is not clear who decides what, every decision generates a prior debate about the right to decide. This meta-debate is pure Process energy.

Finally, hierarchical over-validation — the need to obtain five levels of sign-off for an operational decision — is one of the most common and least-questioned energy leaks in French organisations. It consumes not only time but above all trust, the fundamental fuel of Activity.

Diagnosing and plugging the leaks: where to begin

The T.O.B. offers a five-dimension diagnostic tool called the Fox Diagram, which we detail in a dedicated article. But before even that structured diagnosis, a few simple questions identify the main leak zones.

How many recurring meetings in your calendar produce no decision log? How many issues have been raised for more than three months without being resolved? How many approval processes involve more than three hierarchical levels for decisions below £50,000?

The answers map the topography of your Process consumption. They identify the two or three priority projects: a conflict to arbitrate, a governance to clarify, a decision circuit to shorten.

The goal is not to eliminate Process — that would destroy the social fabric of the organisation. The goal is to make it conscious, to keep it within proportions that preserve productive capacity, and to stop leaks from widening to the point where the organisation spins on itself without awareness.