The Bad Process Industry
How many times have you come across someone in your organization who would surely not be there had things been done the proper way? There are plenty of people employed just because things are not done how they should.
One of the biggest industries in the entire world is a hidden one, and no, it’s not drug trafficking: it’s the Bad Process industry. It creates millions of jobs worldwide yearly, and it is only growing: we have screwed up workflows and processes in the past, and nothing indicates we will stop doing so in the foreseeable future. While trying to fix them we tend to make them worse, which creates more jobs.
Processes rot, as fruits rot, mainly because the surrounding entropy increases over time, and the processes cannot keep up unless energy is spent to adapt them as things evolve. For every useful arrangement of affairs towards a desired process goal, there are many orders of magnitude more arrangements that will get it nowhere or make it less efficient. Every process must be arranged and managed; we have to put in a lot of energy to keep it in an ordered state. Entropy is nature’s tax.
Processes’ rot precedes bureaucracy. Everyone hates bureaucracy; it is cool to hate it. But bureaucracy is an effect, not a cause. The memos, the documents, the paperwork and the excruciating tools are not the ones to blame, really. They are sitting on top of broken processes they can’t fix. It’s like having a fever and blaming the thermometer.
When I go for groceries I tend to spend a solid hour there. When my wife goes, she tends to spend half of that time on the same amount of things. Is it that she walks faster? She does, but the main difference is that she writes the list matching the physical location of items, from main door to the cash, whereas I tend to write things as they randomly pop up to my head while making the list: “oh yeah we’re out of carrots, ok”. ”Milk is gone, check”. We both end up holding a similar piece of paper with stuff handwritten; only one of us has spent an extra bit of energy tying the workflow to the underlying reality. If I were to solve this the corporate way, I would eventually hire someone to go do the groceries for me, because an hour is just too damn long every time.