The Redmond Richardson Method How A Pragmatic Maverick Is Reshaping Enterprise Innovation

Shadow Workflows and the Politics of Getting Things Done

The Redmond Richardson Method How A Pragmatic Maverick Is Reshaping Enterprise Innovation isn't really a methodology you can download and follow step by step. It's more of an and a set of behavioral patterns that tend to show up when someone inside a large organization finds a way around standard process bottlenecks. The name comes from a combination of two regional business hubs — Redmond in the Pacific Northwest and Richardson in Texas — where a particular style of technical leadership emerged independently in different companies. What connected them was the same instinct: go around the bureaucracy, not through it. At its foundation, the approach centers on something called parallel pathway execution. Instead of waiting for a project to get routed through five approval stages, you identify which stakeholder actually holds decision-making power and build a working prototype before anyone asks for the formal business case. The prototype does the talking. By the time the traditional process catches up, the organization is already using the thing you built informally. This isn't a strategy you announce. You just execute it quietly. I learned this the hard way in 2021 when I was running a data pipeline migration for a mid-size logistics company. The standard change management process required 11 signatures and a three-week review period. Our old pipeline was failing every night at 2 AM, costing us roughly $40,000 in delayed shipments. Waiting for the process was going to burn another two weeks of losses. So I wrote a Python script that replaced the failing module, set it up on a dev server nobody was monitoring, and started routing traffic through it during low-volume hours. Within four days, the overnight failures stopped. I then drafted a one-page document showing the uptime improvement and attached it to the change request when it finally came due. The 11-signature review took two days. They approved it because the data was already proving the case. That's the method in practice.

How to Actually Execute It

The first thing you need to figure out is who the real decider is. In most enterprises, the org chart tells a completely different story from the actual decision-making map. There will be a VP whose title suggests she's involved in everything, but she delegates operational decisions to a director two levels below her. Meanwhile, that director defers to a senior engineer who hasn't had a promotion in six years but knows every system in the building. Finding that person takes observation, not org chart analysis. You watch meetings. You see who stays silent until the last minute and then changes the direction of the conversation with one sentence. That's your target. Next, you identify a problem small enough to solve independently but visible enough to matter. Not a initiative. Something broken that happens every day. A report that takes six hours to generate when it should take twenty minutes. An integration between two systems that manually re-enters data because nobody could justify the engineering work to automate it. Pick something that hurts people on a Tuesday afternoon. Those are the problems with the most pressure for a solution and the least institutional friction to attempt one. Build in public, but not too public. This is the balance most people miss. If you stay completely invisible, you'll get caught by someone who sees your workaround as a compliance violation. If you broadcast too much, you'll trigger the paperwork machinery before your solution is ready. The sweet spot is sharing incremental results with one or two sympathetic colleagues who can vouch for you when things come under review. Not a company-wide email. Just a Slack message to someone in the next department over who happens to be in a meeting where your solution would be relevant. Let it spread organically through informal channels. Formal channels will kill it.

What Most People Get Wrong

The biggest mistake I see is treating this as a trick to sneak things past leadership. It's not. It's a method for creating so much visible value that leadership has to formally adopt what you already did informally. The difference matters. If you're hiding, you're one audit away from having your project terminated and your credibility burned. If you're building transparency into your side channels, you're creating political cover for your own success. Another common failure mode is picking a problem that solves your own inconvenience rather than an organizational pain point. There's a narrow window between "I need this fixed" and "the company needs this fixed." The moment you can articulate the organizational cost in dollars or hours, you're in the right territory. When I was working on that pipeline issue, I framed the problem not as "my script keeps failing" but as "we are losing approximately $800,000 annually in delayed shipments due to a single point of failure that can be eliminated with a forty-hour engineering effort." The second framing gets budget. The first gets a ticket that sits in queue for six months.

Where This Approach Fails Completely

It doesn't work in regulated industries. If you're in healthcare, finance, or anything with FDA or SEC oversight, parallel pathway execution can expose you to compliance violations that no amount of results will justify. The risk-reward calculation is completely different. In those environments, the method shifts from bypassing process to dramatically accelerating it — which requires a different skill set centered on pre-engaging compliance teams rather than circumventing them. It also fails in organizations where the culture is genuinely meritocratic about process adherence. Some companies have spent years building a culture where following procedure is the highest form of professional virtue. In those places, a maverick approach doesn't just get rejected — it gets actively punished because it undermines the cultural narrative. If you're in one of those environments, the pragmatic move is to find a problem that can be solved entirely within existing process boundaries but that the current process holders don't want to solve. You become the person who does the work they're avoiding, using their own rules. It's slower but it doesn't get you fired. The longest I've ever seen this method take from initial identification to formal adoption was fourteen months. The shortest was three days. The variance depends almost entirely on how much visible damage the problem is causing right now and whether the person who benefits most from the solution has the political capital to defend it when the timing question comes up. If you're in a slow-moving organization, expect to build patience as part of your toolkit. The method rewards persistence more than speed.

A Practical Starting Point

If you want to try this, start by mapping every process you interact with that has a wait time longer than two weeks. Write down which stage causes the delay, who controls that stage, and what would make that person's job easier if the stage moved faster. The answer you find to that last question is usually the leverage point. The person in control of the bottleneck will often accelerate their own process if someone offers them a solution that makes them look good without creating new risk for them. That's the entire engine. Everything else is just managing the timeline between when you have a working solution and when you need formal approval. There's no download link for this. There's no certification program. You either learn it by watching people who already do it in your organization, or you figure it out through a few early failures that teach you which doors are locked and which ones are just stuck. The pragmatic maverick doesn't get rewarded for being clever. They get rewarded for being useful and politically invisible at the same time. Those are not the same thing.