xmj's notes

Fragile Processes

As a business (as opposed to a Company of One, like yours truly) your strategic advantage comes from codifying repeated workflows into proper processes. This leads to desirable side effects, one of them being the saved time, money and effort in doing things the Proper Way you’ve always done it.

What I’ve noticed is that many companies go to great lengths to codify complex interactions, but . . . end up either overthinking things, making the process more complicated than necessary; or the very opposite: forgetting to codify things, and then forgetting to execute.

Two examples that I’ve noticed in recent years:

With some creativity, these two very opposite cases are easily solvable. There might be a middle ground between the two extremes - pure laissez-faire, and pure top-down design - and you might be able to find it in due course.