Reflections 30th June

Purpose. Process, and Regenerative Conversation.

This is the third reflection of four exploring our relationship with conversations. Previously, I’ve considered how we relate to performance and values; this week, I’m considering the impact of processes, and then next week, I’ll look at bringing it all together in a short consideration of our conversations about the systems we are part of.

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I’ve always found processes to be a double-edged tool. On the one hand, they are brilliant for deconstructing something we do regularly to understand, refine, and make it more reliable and efficient. On the other hand, processes can become the equivalent of grumpy middle-ranking managers whose interests, status and power are invested in things staying as they are and who resist changes involving learning new ways of working.

All new processes involve turning the heuristics of craft and specialist knowledge into repeatable procedures that can be delivered by less skilled people, then by automation, and then by people-free algorithms. They work on an economic version of the “greater good” argument that what is lost in understanding and connection to craft is compensated by increases in margin.

Processes, like technology, applied in pursuit of faster growth have a shadow; they create debt. Technical debt is a concept in software development that describes the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy (limited) solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer. I suggest process debt is similar.

When we override the understanding of the artisan with the brute force of process, we become blind to the continual, myriad, tiny changes happening around us as we follow the process and tick the boxes. Eventually, the changes accumulate, and the fragility of the process, like the complacent thinking of those incumbent middle managers, is exposed.

In his post this week, Cory Doctorow describes the consequences wonderfully. It's a very good fifteen-minute read, in which he underscores themes of corporate overreach, the erosion of consumer privacy, and the negative impacts of monopolistic practices on society and the economy.

Processes, like most technologies, start with enthusiasm and bright ideals. The challenge for us as artisans is that they eliminate conversations with each other and the materials we use. They prevent us from sensing the small changes in the spaces between process steps as we manage what we measure in pursuit of near-term goals rather than what is affecting the wider system.

Processes, business and political, implemented by big-name consultancies, carry a cost that has to be amortised, adding to the process debt. It is easy, in changing markets, to be paying off the cost of implementing processes that are obsolescent but which we cannot afford to change, ignoring the noises “off stage” from those who are experiencing the pain, preferring to treat them as outliers and anomalies rather than the signal that they are.

We see this in the NHS, Water Companies, Multi Academy Trusts, MOD Procurement, and countless other areas. Processes are followed, often blindly and frequently defensively, used as armour against blame, and evidenced in scandals from Post Office Horizon to contaminated blood.

This means processes get a bad reputation, which they don’t deserve. They are tools, and as my Grandma used to say,

“Only bad workmen blame their tools.”

By the time I post my next Reflection, we will be in the grip of whatever changes the elections in the UK and France portend, and in the shadow of something that looks potentially seismic in the USA, in the knowledge that so many people are disillusioned with the process that they will not vote. It’s not the process’s fault. It’s ours for going helplessly along with it in a way that seems akin to preparing for famine by starving.

I find myself watching many organisations thrash around in the grip of change by blindly applying processes that were “proven” at a different time, in a different place, in different circumstances. From the “practising starving” approach of redundancies to the panic-induced mimetic embrace of AI they do not yet understand even as they are deaf to the observations of those doing the work.

In the absence of conversation, perhaps that is what is left: Schumpeterian “Creative Destruction” to sweep away obsolescent thinking, rentier shareholders, complacent management, and reliance on processes as master, not servant.

Because so much is emerging that requires the skills locked up inside process-bound organisations.

It seems a little drastic, given we have alternatives.

I am beginning to understand “regenerative” less as a definition and more as a mindset where science meets wisdom and exercises original thinking of the type I see manifested in Groundswell this week, and emerging in many areas other than Agriculture.

Processes are walls, valuable in themselves, but not if we allow them to become prisons.

We need conversations outside the walls to imagine what might be next for us as individuals, businesses, and the communities we might create.

This is where I turn to below for paid subscribers as we think about our next conversation in July.

An idea of three types of conversation……

I hope you are having a great weekend; it will be an interesting week.