For the disorganized among us, the creatives, people who generally resist structure -- conversations around business process elicit boredom and confusion. Certainly, process can be taken too far for its own good -- devolving into mind-numbing minutiae. Process, at its best, goes beyond that clear set of instructions enabling us to accomplish routine tasks and delivers a triptik to results. The challenge we face -- as Stowe Boyd points out so well -- is that "routine tasks" are becoming rarer and rarer in today's business environment while marshalling support for a journey to results is becoming more and more chaotic. Therefore, increasingly people assess -- in the moment, based on the context and their experience -- what information they need, and actions they should take, to get their work done. The Power of Pull treads similar ground in its view that digital technology has fundamentally altered that way humans gather, disseminate and interpret information. Boyd's 3C model contrasts collaborative (Process oriented) and Cooperative (Network oriented) organizational cultures. While it's hard to argue with the importance and value of employee's social networks in getting work done, process is still critically important. A continum that places process at an earlier time and network as more current, in my view, mis-interprets process and its value.
Business processes are more than instruction sets for routine activities. In fact, in the best case, they represent flow. The deep dive many process gurus take -- going to the bottom of the well in order to clean and refine -- has encouraged the kind of rigid view that Boyd critques. In real life, work flows across traditional organizational structures like business units, departments, regions, and functions. Process can and should help us to understand the flow of work including critical relationships, handoffs, knowledge transfer and more. Herve Brittman has a great application of this way of thinking about process in his Metro Map concept. Herve's metaphor sets up process as a journey organized around critical activities and milestones. This is a more reality-based appraisal of how people experience Process -- for better or worse -- in organizations where I've practiced over the years. Strong process focus has the potential to disrupt existing organization designs and structures shifting the focus toward results and away from turf battles between different professional groups (e.g. chemists, biologists, anthropologists, marketeers, designers, etc.) There is still plenty to critique about process -- especially the focus on depth (bottom of the well) rather than flow. Work flows across processes as well and process silos can be just as damaging to getting results as other forms of organizational turf.
Those of us who occupy ourselves thinking through how people in organizations get work done and deliver results can easily get bogged down in modeling. A more action-oriented approach is needed today . . . one that establishes a healthy balance between the fast-paced, networked, loose, one-off path to results and the a more organized, journey-based, process driven path. Here are a few activities to pull it together:
- Establish purpose and outcomes first. What are you after . . . that has to be front and center for anyone involved in the work
- All work has routines embedded within the larger picture; use the digital tools at hand to make them standard enough that they disappear from view
- Build out your relationship touch points. Learn where the critical handoffs are.
- Don't re-invent the wheel. Know when to adapt, brazely rip-off, or simply re-use; this is the essence of Process-thinking
- Map out the journey and revisit it frequently. A map is for guidance, not rigid instructions.
- Spread the wealth. Bring others with you through transferring the what and how of your work to collegues.
- Make time to understand and agree to processes with your colleagues before getting to far into the work.
- Don't take peoples' alignment with your thinking for granted. Make it explicit.
