Don't Trust the Process
Whether you think they are central to the functioning of any organisation or just bureaucratic tyranny, processes make the world go round. But what should our attitude to them be?
"They're more like guidelines" - Captain Barbosa
I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with ‘process’. It seems somehow necessary and I'm glad when I get on a plane the pilot has followed a process to do the safety checks rather than just kicking the tyres and checking the fuel gauge. Yet at the same time having to follow the most basic process myself can send me into a rage. I'm a human being with hopes and dreams and I've already asked nicely so no I won't fill in your bloody form.
For someone who has a fairly prickly relationship with process, public sector procurement was possibly an interesting first choice of job. And now, having departed to the world of consulting, I often work with clients in other sectors to assess their processes, so by this point I’ve really had the opportunity to face my demons.
The first important thing to establish is what we mean when we talk about ‘process’. Most things can be considered to be a process. Going to the supermarket is a process, cooking lobster thermidor is a process, digesting lobster thermidor is a process and posting a tweet about how good the lobster thermidor was is also a process. Beneath these processes sit more processes that get the ingredients to the shop, electricity to your fridge and your tweet to the Twittersphere.
What we are generally talking about when we complain about process is ‘business process’ - the codified set of actions one must take to get something done in an organisation. This can be anything from getting a new passport to ordering some staples. The best case scenario is that these processes are fully automated meaning you input what you need in at one end and out it pops at the other. The problem is that most processes generally involve pesky humans. Technological processes can be continuously optimised but when you involve biological processes like cognition and communication you are trying to get a human to take a specific action. To do this they must a) understand what to do b) want to do it and c) actually do it. Fortunately people tend to not be quite so robotic, but this does make life harder for anyone trying to get something done, as any dictator will tell you.
We should also distinguish between business processes and standard operating procedures (SOPs). SOPs are essentially processes but specifically the best way of doing something. There is a separate argument here about what should be turned into an SOP and what shouldn’t. For example the pre-flight safety checks mentioned previously should absolutely be SOPs, we don’t want people getting creative about how they check the plane. If however you make an SOP for every single aspect of someone’s job there is no space for ingenuity or experimentation.
The question of what we are really trying to achieve when defining a business process has been floating around in my head for months (exciting I know). It was only recently, listening to The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz (no relation to Anthony as far as I'm aware) on my way home from a hard day trying to establish who was supposed to what and when that things became a bit clearer.
Business process is fundamentally about communication. He points out that in a small business, processes are largely unnecessary as you can turn around and just tell the person what you’re doing or need their help with and it doesn't matter how you do it, you just get the job done. But in a big company when there are numerous departments and people involved in getting something done, communication is not guaranteed. A good process means that everyone who needs to be, is informed, and can input as needed in order to get the best possible result. You make full use of the organisation and don’t inadvertently sabotage each other’s work.
The moment that the process is not enabling communication it becomes a waste of time. One of the hallmarks of a bad process is where there is data being hoarded and not used (this is usually the culprit behind excessive form filling which we experience as much in our personal lives as our professional). This is a failure in communication because one party is sending information to another and it is not being heard or interpreted.
Another symptom of a cumbersome process is excessive approvals. This is partly about control but also about communication. If everything requires approval this is generally because there is a lack of confidence that the people actually driving the process are communicating effectively with each other and managers therefore need more visibility of what is going on.
You should therefore ALWAYS question the process. That doesn't mean it was designed by an idiot or even that it is wrong but there is very little in life that is fixed aside from the laws of physics, which even then seem to be regularly refreshed. A prickly relationship with process is in fact a good relationship with process. We often want to decide that something is good or bad but unfortunately that is the easy way out. There will often be a better way of doing something, so it is important to remain open to this possibility.