10 paradoxes of processes

Is it possible that the organization operates without processes? Which goals does the organization achieve during operations formalization? What is the life cycle of a process?

There are a lot of concerns and disputes around such questions. Five years of operations management gave me experience, knowledge, conclusions, and some answers on those and similar questions. I took over the experience of colleagues, supervisors, and other authors, analyzed it all, and produce some structure. The result you can see below.

Perhaps this discourse can be useful for the newcomers of the management who often believe like me some time ago that the formalized process can solve all of the problems.

So it’s about processes. Definitions we can find here Google. I’ve worked out the following approach — the process is the consequences of actions, nonlinear perhaps, which have to be done by the employee or by the group to resolve the task assigned. It’s quite simple. You have a task assigned, you have an action plan or checklist, just do it, and the result will come. The devil is in the detail, as always.

What if there is no action plan for the concrete task? What if the process doesn’t bring the expected result? How to remember all the processes to increase performance? What if the process is annoying?

It’s not a full list of questions. But the last is an interesting one. Let it be the starting point of the reasoning. So, the process can be annoying. If the employee doesn’t like it or considers it inefficient, stupid, and so on. Therefore the employee will be breaking the process, getting on his own will, doing “right.” Here we come with an important conclusion; the process can work and work efficiently if the employee buys it.

Paradox #1. The presence of a formalized process doesn’t mean that the employee will follow it.

Ok. The employee could be dismissed for the process violation. Or something can be done with the process. It means the organization has to spend additional effort (money) to make employees follow processes. There is another way. You can change the approach for the tasks resolving. The result is more important than the process. It’s a free interpretation of the Agile Manifesto we can hear often. It often means, here is your task, here is the expected result, do whatever you want to achieve it. The result is, the organization spends additional effort (money) to communicate tasks a lot. It’s said, here is the chaos coming. And everybody points and speaks; this organization doesn’t have processes.

Paradox #2. The absence of formalized processes generates the desire of employees to have them.

Actually, if the appropriate task is assigned to the employee, he or she can be in two extreme situations

• I never did it, and I don’t know how to do it. In this case, the employee needs exact expectations, templates, norms, rules, steps, policies, guidelines, that is the process. The organization gets control due to the guidance of the employee through the task.
• I did it so many times, and I don’t need any guidance. In this case, the employee needs an understanding of expectations. The organization decreases costs on the management due to delegation of responsibility.

Paradox #3. The best employees follow their own processes and thus solve their tasks in the creative and non-standard ways, optimize their workflow, share their experience, help to implement the ideas, increase the efficiency of the organization. If they get lucky, they develop their careers proactively.

In an ideal organization, any employee should be evolved from the first case to the second one through 7 levels of delegation. To delegate and collaborate, people have to have an agreement on how to work together (and with clients).

So, the AGREEMENT is what makes the process come to life. Ideally, it’s the agreement of the manager and employees who will have to follow the process. Herewith it doesn’t matter who is the author of the process; the result is the agreement that some task has to be resolved in accordance with the process proposed. So when we are talking about processes absence, it’s about the absence of the agreement on HOW we should resolve the concrete task. The agreement doesn’t mean it’s “write down somewhere.” As discussed above, the process exists then, and only then employees follow it.

The extreme ways the agreement can be done are

• Retrospective, which is often is a case. The common way is to fail, sort the fail out, make the agreement not to do it anymore, and write the correct behavior down.
• Proactive action, which is most valuable if it works. There is the task, and the employee asks the question before he/she starts to resolve it “how to resolve the tasks in the best way?”. The employee meets the manager, the team, anyone, and determines the process idea. If the idea works, then the norm can be introduced. If the norm can be described, spread out to the team, then we can get the new process as the outcome.

It makes sense to make an agreement on

• repeatable tasks
• if it’s hard to remember the process in case of steps and branches variety
• it’s a must if the error price is too high, for instance, life is at stake

So the process is an agreement which clarifies to the employee how to resolve concrete task on the one hand and provides confidence to the organization that concrete task will be resolved in a certain way and with a certain efficiency on the other. By default, the process has to make easier of concrete tasks solving. The process makes the task easier through the rules, patterns, clear expectations, sequences of the actions. The process works then, and only then it’s accepted by employees whose behavior the process has to regulate. The process has to help the organization to control the execution.

Paradox #4. In the perfect world, it is the most interesting case to operate without processes, although processes exactly make controllability and the existence of the organization possible.

Ultimately any organization accumulates those agreements (processes) and sooner or later starts the project to build the system of processes management. This system has to allow to formalize processes, store them in one place, provide access, educate employees, and improve processes. The system has to increase the value of processes and provide the environment in which employees know about processes, learn, remember, and accept them. If not, employees don’t follow processes, and the organization loses or doesn’t gain efficiency.

Paradox #5. A process for process’s sake is an evil (bureaucracy).

The next phase is usually a process MAINTENANCE. It’s about control and monitoring if employees follow the process. Here employees can split into several groups even if the agreement phase was passed “successfully” and the organization considers the process implemented

• group of accepted, and it can be supporters and those who are indifferent
• employees who see real flaws but their opinion is not taking into consideration
• employees who suffer from any changes, they are conservative and retrograde
• saboteurs whose principal position is not to follow the process for some reason
• revolutionaries who call for others to not follow the process
• newcomers, employees who have to accept the process by default and they can jump into one of the mentioned groups eventually

The process will fail if the number of dissatisfied employees is critical. The organization can coerce employees to follow the process formally or automate routines, can explain and motivate or clarify the expected results. Eventually, everyone will get used to the process.

The process can pass to the next phase, which is SELF-ORGANIZATION. The goal of any organization is to lead any process to that phase. The organization spends a minimum of the effort to support the process and gets a maximum of the control. By default, no one uses the knowledge base. Employees educate each other. The process can deviate from its formalized version, but it usually causes the enhancement of results. It can be the highest point of any process existence and the most comfortable phase for employees.

Paradox #6. Even the process is described, the employees often ask the question “how to do it” to managers and experienced employees.

Most comfortable doesn’t mean the most efficient. An important phase of any process life cycle is an IMPROVEMENT phase. It’s a dangerous phase. It’s less dangerous if this phase is process CHANGE phase. And very important to have an agreement about what change considers as an improvement. It can be different for organizations and concrete employees. It’s obvious, the improvement of the process is always about efficiency — faster, cheaper, and so on. Measurement and metrics is a topic of a different discussion, but it’s not possible to improve anything without it. The decision about process improvement is always the balance of achieved level of control, expected efficiency, and resources available.

Paradox #7. If it works, don’t touch it.

If the organization is growing and follow the market, then some processes are continually changing and never reach even the maintenance phase. The organization sometimes has to rebuild settled and working processes from scratch to continue business expansion. If it’s about internal manufacturing processes, it causes enormous stress for employees.

Paradox #8. Change or die.

On the other hand, if the process is stable enough, it can be AUTOMATED. It means the process can be provided with software that doesn’t leave a choice for employees on how to follow the process and accelerate the execution of the process (usually due to minimum effort on routines). And automation is a final phase of the process life cycle. The organization gets maximum profit if employees automate the processes due to self-organization.

The different story is an external process. It’s about the cooperation of the organization with partner organizations. And organizations are willing to enforce their rules to each other. The customer usually is in a winning position. And it’s always a tough decision for the organization to lose the customer or to customize their processes. Such customization can ruin the operational consistency of the organization.

Paradox #9. The process restricts clients’ demands in general, and it can be annoying for them.

Finally, some processes have a straight forward individual nature. The individual contributors have to follow processes too if they want to achieve the highest efficiency.

The process is always about the balance between predictability and creativity, management overhead and outcome, repeatability and uniqueness, discipline and freedom. The process is not about the comfortable achievement of results. The process is rules and discipline for everyone in the organization, even for business owners. The same process can be perfect for one organization and not work at all for another.

Paradox #10. There is no silver bullet.

The volume, the format, and most of the process life cycle phase determine the level of organizational maturity. The maturity model works if the organization solves concrete challenges that can be assessed. Only then processes help the organization to get efficiency.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.