The Fence You Shouldn't Tear Down | Nate Amidon on What Business Leaders Get Wrong About Process
FULL EPISODE
Most of us have been in that meeting… where someone new comes in and starts cutting things. Meetings get canceled, processes get scrapped, and systems get rebuilt from scratch. It feels decisive and efficient, but according to Nate Amidon, it might be exactly the wrong move.
Nate is the CEO of Form 100 Consulting, a specialized staffing and execution firm that embeds former military officers and senior NCOs directly into enterprise technology teams. He spent 12 years on active duty as a C-17 cargo pilot and is retiring this July with 23 years of service. He has seen dysfunction up close in both the military and the private sector, and his take on process is more nuanced than most people expect from someone with that background.
He puts it simply: "Whenever we go into a new client, I always take this approach... if you buy a piece of property and there's a fence on the property, it seems like a stupid fence. Don't just tear it down. Because there's a reason somebody put the fence there."
The Problem With Playing Cleanup
There's a real temptation, especially for leaders coming in from the outside, to equate action with improvement. Fewer meetings means more productivity. Less process means more agility. Cleaner systems mean better results. And sometimes, that's true…but not always. Nate has walked into enough chaotic technology programs to know that the chaos usually isn't caused by too much structure, but the wrong kind, applied inconsistently. The answer to that problem is about clarity, not subtraction.
What often looks like bureaucratic fluff is actually load-bearing. A recurring meeting that seems redundant might be the only time two teams ever actually talk. A process that looks overly formal might be quietly preventing a compliance issue from blowing up in the background. Before you tear it down, you have to understand why it's standing.
"I'm always just a little bit hesitant at first, and I'm always trying to justify why we have meetings," Nate says. "And when I find that they're not justified... this is my favorite thing to do."
What the Military Actually Taught Him About Process
You might expect a former Air Force pilot to be a rigid rule-follower, but Nate is the first to push back on that idea.
He describes bootcamp as a shock, not because of the physical demands, but because of the sheer volume of seemingly pointless requirements. Socks folded a certain way…shoes shined just so. At the time, it felt completely intolerable. "I have this intolerance for stupid things," he admits. "And the military's full of that."
But over time he came to understand that those rules were building attention to detail, follow-through on small things…and a baseline of trust that comes from knowing the person next to you will do what they said they would do, even when no one is watching.
"I didn't realize how important they were until I got into business," he says. "The ability to be a trusted teammate... that's super valuable."
That's the insight the fence analogy is all about. The military's version of process can seem absurdly dense, but underneath is a real engineering problem being solved: how do you get a large group of people, under pressure, to move in the same direction without constant supervision? The answer is standards. Shared language. Clear ownership. Tight communication flow. Those same fundamentals, stripped of the excess, are exactly what most struggling technology teams are missing.
Three Things That Almost Always Need Fixing
When Nate goes into a new organization, he's looking for the same three gaps regardless of industry, size, or technology stack.
The first is a clear picture of who is actually doing what. Not the org chart, which tells you who reports to whom... an execution chart, which tells you who owns what outcome. "Almost universally, it doesn't exist," he says. "And it's one of the first things I'll do when I go into an organization."
The second is a clean task management system. Jira, Azure DevOps, Monday... the tool doesn't matter much. What matters is whether the backlog reflects reality. "If you open it up and it gives you anxiety, that's usually how you can tell."
The third is lightweight documentation of how the team actually operates. Not a policy manual, something closer to a field guide. Here's how we run a planning session. Here's who owns the agenda. Here's when we communicate up the chain and how. "We're not trying to recreate the military," Nate is careful to say. "Military's got more than you need."
The goal isn't compliance, it's shared understanding. When people know the answers to those three things, Nate estimates you clear out about 80% of the problems.
When the Process Is the Problem
None of this means the process is always good or that more is better. Nate is equally ruthless about cutting what isn't working.
His example on meeting cost is a useful gut check. Take 20 engineers at $100 to $150 an hour. Add one hour for a status update that could have been an email. Do the math, then multiply it by 52 weeks. "Is it worth this much money?" he asks. Sometimes the answer is yes, but more often it isn't.
The discipline he's describing is really about intent. Every process and meeting should exist because something would break if you removed it. If nothing would break and the cost isn’t worth the outcome, it’s candidate for the cut list.
He also notes that too much structure carries its own risk, especially in engineering environments. "If you have too much process, you'll crush the engineering innovation... you're asking the engineers when things are gonna be done every five seconds and they don't have time to get anything done."
The goal is balance... not a fixed ratio.
The fence analogy stays with you because it reframes the whole question. It's not "is this process good or bad?" It's "do I understand it well enough to know what I'd lose by removing it?" That's a harder question, and a more honest one. And if Nate Amidon's track record is any indication, it's the right place to start.
Catch the full conversation From Air Force Pilot to CEO | What Military Leaders Do That Corporate America Can't | Nate Amidon on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
