My day-to-day work is all about processes.
Processes are a good thing. They mean repeatability, predictability, they can be honed until good outcomes are guaranteed.
I work with computers, and software that enables business to run efficiently. If you can’t define a really good tight process, that software can’t help you, usually. Computers are great at process because they don’t make mistakes. If there is a problem, it’s because of the process, not the computer.
And yet … all these good things about process have led us to think it’s always the answer. And it’s not. There are big important drawbacks, and the chaotic world is shrieking at us, louder and louder, that we are going to have to stop our worship of process or perish.
There are two categories of reason, and I’ll start with the fluffier one.
Process and procedure dehumanises us.
Human beings are drawn to repeatable patterns. Where there is no real pattern, we impose one. We want to know why. We want to be able to repeat what worked, and avoid what went wrong. We have lucky underpants and avoid stepping on the cracks.
But we form and take on our own patterns and habits. It doesn’t work the same or feel the same when patterns are imposed on us.
Flourishing, as a human being, requires agency. Agency requires meaningful choice. Success feels meaningless if what we do is controlled, because at some level we don’t feel as though it belongs to us. And failure feels like a punishment because we didn’t have a chance to make things different.
This is one reason why modern life is so dissatisfying to so many.
The wider demands of the structures we fit into – government, employment, society generally – have come to be process-driven in ways we take for granted, and for good reason. Things need to happen reliably and successfully, and can’t have failure risked because somebody particular is crucial to the result, and they’re missing or have an off day. So there’s a strong drive to make everybody replaceable, to mine them for anything special and codify it so others can do the same. Replace talent and skill with replicable process, in other words. There’s safety and predictability in that.
And yet … it mostly leaves us asking “So why me? What am I bringing to this?” As things change to make the organisation around us more secure, we are drained of individual purpose and meaning. What’s good for the whole is at the expense of the individual human.
In process, there’s no scope for what makes me, me, and that, over time, weighs on us all, some more than others. Possibly most of all on those who have the most individual value, as they’re flattened into what others can emulate.
That, slowly and unnoticed, causes deeper danger to wider society and the organisations that make it up, than first appears, and we are starting to see the cracks appearing without realising what caused them.
The very foundations of stability and prosperity become brittle, and have no “give” to absorb dissatisfaction even as it works less and less well for a critical mass of those within the system.
Process is a gift to enemies
In war, there is almost no greater disadvantage than predictability.
Making clear that when this happens, the reaction is that, and there are defined steps for every eventuality, invites attacks on the weakest spots, disruption of dependencies and gives the enemy the easiest of game plans. They know where and when to strike, and how to avoid the results.
In war, if a combatant isn’t destroyed, it often comes out the other side having made more progress in certain ways than happened in years of peace beforehand, largely because they have to learn this fact fast, tear apart all the ways things were done and do whatever is necessary. The result is not no process, of course, but a Darwinian explosion of alternatives and things that would never normally be tried, some of which become new winners.
Much the same happens in times of financial crisis or turmoil, too, which is why, for all the pain they cause, many economists think such crises are necessary.
The key fact is: in times of stable predictability, process wins, but in chaos it’s a liability. In an existential struggle for survival, the side that will do anything at all is likely to defeat the side that keeps doing exactly the same thing.
We keep seeing this play out in world news, often with the reaction that the anything-goes participants should be condemned as unfair. Which misses the point entirely, because if unfairness is working then it won’t go away.
Confronted with changed circumstances, let alone chaotic ones or others desperately taking advantage, the only rational response is to change, and keep changing as much as necessary, not keep doing the same defined things.
The trap
The problem with this is that the people in charge (and this is not just about world affairs, it applies at every level) are always the ones who’ve done well out of stable predictability. So the idea of anything else is deeply unattractive.
Ask any software developer who has tried to introduce agility.
Process, as a wise business consultant once told me in a specific context, creeps in like water and sets like concrete. The advantages are too clear, and the pitfalls too abstract.
We optimise, and harmonise, and regulate, and encourage predictable, correct behaviour. Of course we do. It’s so obviously beneficial, and right. But we slowly create the conditions in which our careful correct systems can’t function any more. And then blame the conditions instead of adapting.
If we’re wise, we’ll learn agility before we’re forced to.