Process is the output of management

Johnnie points to this Shirky piece which only goes half way: Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity.

Process is the feature creep of organizations. In the same way software has to have features, groups have to have process. But like software, process creep in groups is insidious -- each additional check in or form seems to cost little and add much, but over time, the cumulative overhead of process can hamstring an organization, almost without their noticing.

Clay seems to have overlooked one of his TED talks back in 2005 when he talked about Institutions vs collaboration and pointed out that once the institution exists, its primary function becomes to survive, especially since it has a whole cadre of people whose sole function is the maintenance of that institution; like they are going to vote themselves out of a job if the job itself goes away - for example advertising agencies or big media companies.

The management of an organisation doesn't produce anything, the designers, the engineers, the production people, sqales people, service and repair people, they all do real things relating to the output of the business, but the "company" has a whole different bunch of aims and objectives and very quickly they become inverted on themselves.

Since they can't actually measure their own work in terms of items produced or sold etc, they have to create new measures that "track" other people's work. In order to do that, things that are implicit in actual production and don't actually need documentation (see Taiichi Ohno for the textbook on that) suddenly have to become explicit and documented so that the management can "see" and "measure" things because those measurements are its ONLY output.

But to do that you have to have "processes". At some point in the growth of an organisation, it then becomes someone's meta-job to manage the process process and so it goes.

By that stage the organisation has been well captured by management and its primary function has become to support and aggrandise those people to the exclusion of all else. The stellar CEO then manipulates the company's "performance" to enhance their own reputation and in a few years we have a business that is headed for the scrapyard.

This is not a bad thing, the existence of eternal corproations is a threat to all of us and we need them to collapse and fall apart on a regular basis so that the useful bits can be recycled into actual value for the rest of us.

As for trying to stop "stupidity", good luck with that guys.

Comments

[Mike Wagner]

I've been following this a bit with Johnnie and Clay and now your post. Good pot stirring thoughts!

As I read your post I kept thinking of Yeats poem, The Second Coming and the line "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold."

It is good that process is not enough of a center to hold together corporations.

The image of "recycled corporate value" has got my mind racing.

Thanks!

Keep creating,
Mike

[SImon]

I came across this via Johnnie Moore's blog. A very perceptive and thought-provoking comment - thanks for sharing
Simon

[Saltation]

spot on (and you may remember my near-original post likening working inside such an organisation to driving down a mountainside with someone who refused to look thru the windscreen but demanded to discuss HOW we looked)

but here's a thought. imagine a species where a subset of the group discovered that the original group would get on with real-world stuff regardless, thereby freeing up THEIR time to imitate, cargo-cult-stylee, the appearance of the things which the original group created value with, which EVERYONE agreed were high-value and hence high-status. and since humans (and all social animals) breed for social status, that subset would tend to be MORE successful over time and as a whole, than the subset they rely on.

then think through the implications. after about 40,000 years of breeding for it.

scary, no?