Processes are not to be followed

Building Processes is Fundamental, following them not so much.

I am paraphrasing Dwight Eisenhower who said “planning is everything, plan is nothing”, and there is a reason for it.

You might be surprised to know that the Pentagon has a Zombie apocalypse plan, but you can find it online. If you take a minute to read it you’ll realized that they only did it for the mental exercise.

When you are drawing a plan or a process you are not only preparing yourself for what you expect, but also for a wide array of possibilities. You are making yourself or your team ready to adapt for change.

In your work there are a lot of things you do repeatedly, or that have a lot of similarities, and is very frustrating to realize that you are constantly remaking the same job unnecessarily.

The worst part is that we tend to fall in the same mistakes, over and over, because we don’t have a systematic way to add incremental changes.

What most of us don’t get about processes, is that they are not meant to keep things steady. They exist to allow innovation.

When you don’t have a process laid out, you do everything as if it was the first time. Others keep a good memory of some past event and keep alternating between two methods just running from the last one.