Too often, “it ran according to procedure” is a get out of jail free card for people who do incredibly stupid things.
“Oh, well, if they’ve followed process, we can hardly blame them” is the narrative the people responsible for some catastrophe or other would like you, or their boss, or the police, to think. That way, no matter how harmful the result, they get away with whatever they’ve done.
Now, that’s not to say that there is no value in processes and procedures.
If you’re about to pilot me across the Atlantic in a jet airliner, I’d much prefer that you went through the pre-flight checklist thoroughly than just flung your bag behind the pilot’s seat and went “naah, it’ll be OK – I won’t bother with the pre-flight checks today”.
But in most business situations, this idea of being a slave to the process is ultimately harmful to your bottom line.
The concept itself creates some significant issues. (The biggest issue is also the biggest blind spot of people pushing AI solutions – which is why you shouldn’t use those either, but that’s not the point of today’s article.)
For a rigid process to work unfailingly, 100% of the time, you need:
- a series of activities you can specify so precisely that a robot could do them
- perfect information about every aspect of the situation
- the situation itself needs to be stable and never fluctuate from the pre-determined norm
- there can be no interaction with people outside your business, whether customers or suppliers, or government bodies who may behave in unpredictable ways, and
- you need to have complete control over every aspect of what you’re seeking to achieve in a closed environment
When you think about this for even two seconds, you’ll realise that virtually no activity in the world can possibly tick all these boxes, so valuing and rewarding slavish, unthinking adherence to a process that you know in advance will be wrong 10%, 20%, 50% or more of the time is insanity.
Insanity. Yet remarkably common, as we’ll see in a moment.
While you need some processes in place to manage your business, fundamentally what you really need is people who think to themselves “this is taking us in completely the wrong direction for our people, our customers, and our company” and do something different.
That puts them in a difficult position, because if it all goes horribly wrong and they weren’t following process, they might get fired. And even if they save the company from going down in flames by diverging from the standard, pre-determined response in that situation, some jobsworth will probably feel the need to tell them they shouldn’t do that again or they’ll be reported to HR.
You need the right result, not the right process
As a business, what you’re really looking for is the right result – the right result for the business, the people in it, and its customers.
How you get there is a matter of choice.
Sometimes a rigid process will get you there – if you run payment transfer systems for a bank, for example, a rigid process with sign-offs and transfer limits is a really good idea.
More often, a process will be imperfect, at least some proportion of the time, because whoever designed the process isn’t God (although one or two of them think they are just because they can make a prototype work in a computer lab).
People who design processes tend to be people sitting in a conference room somewhere with some colleagues and some flipchart paper. Or, worse, someone on their own tapping away on a computer keyboard with their headphones on blasting out heavy metal music to shut out the rest of the world while they type.
One way or another, most processes are designed by people who sit far behind the frontline where their processes get used every day.
Funnily enough, this is a concept the armed forces accept. They know it’s impossible for the generals in headquarters to know what it’s like, minute-by-minute in a 10-yard stretch of a trench on the front lines of a battlefield.
So the modern armed forces use a concept called Commander’s Intent to get instructions from the headquarters to the front line.
In essence, the generals set out the objective they would like to accomplish, such as “capture the hill to the south-west of your current position and prevent the enemy resupplying their own troops through the valley that runs under that hill”.
Just by reading those few words you understand the “what” and the “why” – what it is you need to do and why it matters.
But the generals go beyond that. They also provide guidance about what not to do – that might be the need to avoid civilians nearby, preserve some critical piece of infrastructure like a bridge, or not to advance beyond point X until after the airstrike to soften up the defenders has taken place.
They also think about the resources they have at their disposal. Even if the objective remained the same, any sane person would accomplish it entirely differently depending on whether they were trying to achieve it with 20 grizzled Royal Marine veterans or 100 conscripts fresh out of initial training.
Finally, the generals do the most important thing of all. They get out the way and let the commander on the ground make the best decisions they can, in full cognisance of the objective that’s been set, with the resources at their disposal. This approach also allows commanders on the ground the flexibility to make changes to the plan when they discover, for example, that enemy reinforcements have just arrived, or that the enemy has set up a minefield where one didn’t exist before.
Knowing what they know about the what, the why, and the no-go areas, they can make decisions on the fly and still achieve the initial objective, even if that wasn’t done in the way they had originally thought they might.
Weird, isn’t it? For most civilians, the armed forces feels like a very hierarchical place where people blindly follow orders at all times, but it’s not like that at all. Quite the opposite.
In fact, mid-level managers in a large business are likely to have significantly less room for manoeuvre in decision-making than a junior officer on the battlefield would.
The problem isn’t so much one for the manager making the decision, who I accept has to play the cards they’re dealt, as it is a problem with the leadership inside that organisation.
Rigid processes cost more
One of the key points that leadership teams overly fond of rigid processes tend to overlook is that rigid processes are always more expensive to operate than processes more akin to the “commander’s intent” approach described above.
Let’s take a simple example, based on an actual real-life experience of mine.
Most organisations receive calls, letters, and emails from their customers about some issue or other. So the company I worked for had specified a large, complex and, to be fair, very good, CRM system to manage those activities.
To do that, however, they needed to set up processes and decision trees so that a call centre agent could use the CRM to navigate their way towards a solution.
Not entirely unreasonably, that required a degree of diagnosis of the problem, some noting down of information, some time for the agent to think about which option out of the ones available on the screen in front of them was the best fit in this particular situation, and so on.
What that meant, though, was that they had pretty much “hard wired” the call handling time according to how many of each type of enquiry came in that day. And in a call centre, your resource requirements, and thereby costs, are largely determined by your call handling time.
That, of course, was the ideal situation.
What actually happened was that customers weren’t aware of the process and, not unreasonably, didn’t much care what it was. So if the first words out the customer’s mouth were the answer to the question on the 10th screen of the diagnosis process, the agent would, in all probability have to ask the question again 10 screens later as they wouldn’t always remember every detail out of the hundreds of calls they might handle in a day.
Specifying a rigid process, therefore, necessarily built inefficiencies (and cost) into the process of resolving a customer query. This is true every time you build a rigid process, by the way. You inevitably bake in a certain cost base, along with a degree of avoidable inefficiency.
What we did was take the concept and re-do the CRM so that questions could be recorded in any order, not just in the order of the diagnosis process. The agent still had to answer all the questions, but just by taking out the rigid sequencing, we enjoyed significant time savings and drove much greater efficiencies.
So for all the people who claim that rigid processes are unfailingly more cost-efficient, I have bad news. The exact opposite is almost always true. By design, rigid processes are much more expensive to operate than less rigid ones.
Not only is the process more costly to operate, rigid processes tend to spawn layers of management and control, each of which adds further costs into the equation – again the very opposite of being cost-effective.
In a rigidly-controlled process environment, you’ll need a department manager, and a couple of assistant managers to sign things off when the manager isn’t around. The managers in the department will spend a lot of time in meetings with one another, which will mostly not add value to the business. And they’ll also spend a lot of time in meetings with other managers across the business, even fewer of which will be value-adding.
Rigid processes mean you bake in a level of operating cost to run the process, along with higher-than-necessary management and supervision costs.
Rigid processes aren’t more cost-efficient, they are less cost-efficient.
The problem is the objective
But the real problem with most process design is in the way the objective is specified in the first place.
If the objective is “follow the process”, then you’ll probably get grudging compliance most of the time. But you’ll also create a range of – often costly – bad outcomes which were not envisaged as possibilities by whoever set up the process in the first place.
Imagine if the objective was set as “make sure the customer is happy” rather than “take them through 10 different screens full of questions in sequence and give them the answer at the bottom”.
Now we’re in “commander’s intent” territory and, to most people’s surprise, the area of maximum cost efficiency.
Very few customers enjoy being taken through 10 screens of questions in sequence. If you can ask “what do you want to do today?” and go straight to doing that, customers will love you, even if you parcel up the call in 30 seconds instead of 3 minutes.
By doing exactly what the customer wanted – no more, no less – you’ve probably got a much happier customer than any amount of process would have left you with. And you’ve done it in 30 seconds, not 3 minutes, for an 80%-odd saving in resource requirements and therefore cost.
But once you specify an objective in process terms, you lock in higher cost, and usually lower performance, than if you’d taken more of a “commander’s intent” approach.
And AI won’t help. Even leaving aside sky-high (and getting higher) token costs, and the fact that 20% of the time or more AI solutions are wrong (leading to significant clean-up costs), AI is incapable of doing anything other than follow the process because that’s how computers work. So the likelihood of your AI system generating sub-optimal answers and then implementing them, to the detriment of your business, is high.
If that happens often enough, you would have been better off keeping the humans employed and ignoring the shiny-suited tech salesperson who flogged you their AI solution.
But all this boils down to leadership, really.
To run with looser systems, you have to be much clearer on your objectives, and much clearer on your no-go areas, so that your team has the guardrails they need to make decisions without every step having to be specified in advance.
So you might want your customers to be happy, for example. But not if they will only be happy if they get a 90% discount on your normal prices.
To boost your bottom line, clarity about what your objectives really are, and the trade-offs you are prepared to accept, are essential because that allows you to take out most of the inefficiencies created by rigid processes and layers of management.
And ironically the best way to do that is to think like an army general.
Not a general as they are often portrayed in popular culture, rigid, unyielding, a stickler for detail.
But a general as they are in practice today, where they spend a lot of time and effort identifying objectives, explaining why those objectives are important, and setting guardrails for the commanders on the ground. And then they step away and don’t interfere.
Most businesses would become more efficient and boost their bottom line if they operated with “commander’s intent” at the core of their decision-making.
Remember the line attributed to Charles Darwin: “it’s not the strongest of the species that survives, or the most intelligent, but the most adaptable to change”?
The more rigid your processes, the less likely it is your business will survive, no matter how smart the people who designed them were.
Adaptability is key for survival and that means rigid processes, by definition…and by science!…are not as good as more adaptable ones.