A Case for Process
And the costs of trying to make everything more efficient
The topic of efficiency gets a lot of airtime in organizational life. Just think back to your last strategic planning session, ops review, retreat, or even weekly team meeting. Efficiency is often glorified as both the diagnosis and the cure, as the thing we should always be striving for. On the flip side, what we often miss is the opportunity to ravish in the art of process and all that it—when thoughtfully designed—begets us.
Process is sometimes viewed from a lens of bureaucracy and perhaps even apathy and unresponsiveness. We often blame it when decisions takes too long, when we’re frustrated by a delay, or when market conditions are forcing dramatic responses. We think that process limits us in getting what we want, or where we need to go. But interestingly, it is process that gets us to the point of creating something that we don’t just need now, but that we need down the line.
Process is the actual mechanism through which work gets done. It is the thing through which people figure out what they need to solve, and the thing through which teams become—imperfectly and sometimes painfully—something more than just a group of individuals in the same room. Efficiency, as a goal, keeps asking one question: how do we get there faster? But process, if we allow it to serve as the wonderful tool that it is, reminds us that the work of getting there is not inefficiency to be eliminated, but information, relationship, and possibility to be channeled into something meaningful and sustainable.
Here are three things process offers that an over-indexed fixation on efficiency can’t.
1. Process surfaces what we don’t know we don’t know.
Efficiency works quite nicely when we’ve already figured out the right answer and just need to execute it cleanly. But this assumes the formula has been written and everything is working perfectly, with only minor improvements needed. Most of the time organizations are operating in the context of conditions that are significantly messier than that. The “right” answer isn’t settled yet, or if it has been, new complications or changing market conditions make the previous way of doing obsolete, or at the very least, in need of some alteration. In many cases, you might even learn that the original problem you were solving for isn’t a problem at all, or perhaps it requires a different point-of-view.
With a process orientation, we open ourselves up to a friction, which, despite the discomfort it produces, can lead to discovery. Through process, we allow people to ask, “Wait, why are we doing it this way? Is this actually serving us?” Through process, we mitigate the temptations of speed, recognizing that sometimes slowing down is what helps us speed up, and most importantly, do things better in the long-run. Turns out that speed isn’t everything.
2. Process builds the relationships necessary to make everything else come to fruition.
Sometimes too much of a focus on efficiency can inadvertently result in relationship-building and collaboration being viewed as costs to be minimized. We may not say this outright, but we might as well every time we make someone’s workload so insane that they can’t step out for a bite to eat with a colleague, or anytime we choose to replace a human-to-human interaction with the latest technological tool. I understand the impulse, and I’m not ignorant to the benefits of convenience and timeliness. Plus, coordination between humans can be slow, hard, and altogether exhausting. But aren’t there also considerable benefits to coordination? Isn’t it the back-and-forth, the space for misalignment to be worked out together, what builds the trust that allows a team to truly innovate and succeed? Are these not the spaces where people share uncomfortable truths early enough, before they become crises? This can’t happen amid the relentless pursuit of efficiency. It doesn’t live in the outcome, but in the process of getting there. In each of the moments that probably look like they’re, from the outside, slowing things down.
3. Process creates the conditions for the things we couldn’t have anticipated before getting started.
I’m actually a big fan of wandering around without direction. You know what Tolkien said: “Not all those who wander are lost.” I’ll never forget my most treasured moments adventuring. They’re the ones that were unexpected and unplanned. While I used to plan every single sight, destination, and restaurant months in advance, I’ve come to appreciate the beauty of a little spontaneity—of just seeing where the road takes me.
I think this can also translate to the workplace. Process in organizational life is about far more than administrative scaffolding. It is the structured way we move through our tasks. It is the sequence of decisions, conversations, and checkpoints that turn ideas into outcomes. It is the environment in which people think and build together. When we make room for process, we open ourselves up to what we couldn't have planned for, including things like the problems we didn't know we had and the powerfully transformative relationships that may not have otherwise had the chance to organically form.
Process, by its nature, also puts us in proximity both to one other and to problems for longer periods than a purely efficient system would. Through this proximity, we unearth new interdependencies, whether it be in the conversation that happens after the formal meeting, or in an adjacent problem someone notices while working through what was labeled as the primary one. The connection between two people or two ideas here is significant, because with efficiency might not have allowed it to happen. Efficiency tends to see all of that as a distraction. But a remarkable number of the best things organizations have ever produced started out that way, turning into something more all because someone had the gumption to take the road less traveled.
Let me be clear in that I’m not making an argument against efficiency in its entirety. We obviously need to achieve goals in a timely manner (some more than others, perhaps) and we don’t want to draw things out or make them harder than they need to be. Still, efficiency as our primary organizing principle, as the metric every decision, move, or interaction is optimizing for, tends to weaken the conditions that make for clear goals and the team dynamics necessary to achieve them. Sure, an orientation towards efficiency may lead to faster outputs, but at what cost? We mustn’t be so obsessed with streamlining things that we hamper the relationships, discoveries, and connections that allow for our organizations to not only be successful in a quantitative sense, but tp become truly thriving ecosystems that people are excited to be a part of.
What are you thoughts on efficiency? Have you seen it be harmful for organizations as well? Share your experiences in the comments below!
This is so true. I spend a lot of my time getting to the root of issues where the boring process step was skipped because it wasn't "efficient." The gap always shows up later when something blows up and no one knows what actually happened or can point to a documented process that was followed. Curious what you do to create buy-in for process without it sounding like bureaucracy, that's where a lot of us get stuck.