The triumph of people over process

“When everyone is thinking the same, no one is thinking”
John Wooden

Process is that cozy and comfortable place where those with analytical minds like to escape in order to feel secure and in control. In that ideal world, everything that is going to happen will happen as it has been perfectly laid out on a process slide. Ideally as close as possible to the diagram that with excruciating detail has been shared, printed and passed to all team members. Roles are clear. Milestone dates are foreseen. Outcomes are envisioned. And predictable success is inevitable.

Why do people like to focus on process so much and spend hours and hours rethinking, tweaking, and polishing it? Probably it is because process is the controllable variable of the innovation equation.

What do we have on the other side of the spectrum? Humans.

People are diverse, emotional, unpredictable, messy, temperamental, etc. They can even be an annoying liability in many organizations' mind. How can you possibly sell a project to someone by highlighting the individual skills  and capabilities of the people who are going to be part of it? That would not convince anyone. Everybody has people in their teams! so that can't be the secret sauce that is going to make it successful! Unless you have a lot of super stars with a proven track record (highly improbable if you are an innovation consultancy), you are going to focus on selling your magic potion: process. And most likely, your process is going to be not unlike any other consultancy's in the world. It just has different colors, arrows, words, icons, phases, etc. but the beginning and the end are the same: start with the client needs and ends with a declaration of success.

This obsession with process exemplifies a reductionistic view of talent that is rooted in the thinking of the industrial era: people are replaceable assets that have to be managed in the most efficient way. Process can give the false impression of consistency and reliability but more often than not that is not the case.

How about taking the opposite point of view. Instead of making people adapt to the process, why not give the thinking tools to people so they can come up with the process that fits best to the individualities of the team? 

To think that one project process-fits-all is foolish anyway and the only thing that fosters is sheep thinking. Flip the model around and let people experiment and adapt the process depending on the conditions and the idiosyncrasies of the team members. No hierarchies required. Everybody contributes as equals.

But it is not enough to ask people to do it. People have to be able to do it, and in order to do that, you have to give them the thinking mindset and tools that will allow them to stay focused on the shared goal and to adapt their collective behaviors according to the changing conditions of the project.

I am confident (or at least I want to believe) that in the not too distant future we will see a new breed of organizations that along the products they design, they also highlight the array of professionals who work there, not at a profile/bio level, but more at a deep thinking level.


Photo: Spencer Tunick, Dead Sea