Process is Killing Creativity
How better leadership, not more process, is the secret to scaling organizations.
This Tidbit is meant to be a counter argument for teams and organizations that are process heavy. I believe creating a model for decision making that is continuously improved is more important than adding process. Feel free to leave me some comments at the end of the Tidbit.
Brace yourself for a quick hot take. I had a moment of clarity a few months ago about process, and I wanted to share it.
How process kills creativity and keep us from delivering amazing things
I was thinking about the idea of retrospectives. Over the years I have observed retrospectives, or retros for short, and some of those were well done. But I have observed unscripted retros that were not officially called retros, not scheduled, and not facilitated by the traditional sense of the word. Every single time, without fail, the unscripted, pop-up retrospective was better than anything I’ve ever observed that followed some type of process. This begs the question, “Does process inevitably drain the purpose out of the things we do.” Why does serving process cause us to forget that we are trying to deliver solutions?
A friend recently equated this idea of process to Gollum from Lord of the Rings caressing the One Ring as he uttered, "My precious." The ring of power slowly lures the owner into desiring the ring itself while completely forgetting its power and purpose. Process can be like the ring. Slowly our attention, and even love, drifts from the power the process delivers to the comfort and safety of the process itself.
I was reading somewhere that a great retrospective can start as a conversation about something that feels off. It doesn’t have to be scripted. It doesn’t have to be scheduled. A retro just needs to be a conversation about something that isn’t working with the intent of crafting an experiment that might fix it.
The idea that I am scratching at is this: any time we try to add process to something, we inevitably build an altar to that process, and we lose the organic power behind the things we're trying to do. There seems to be some type of obfuscation of the heart of why we’re doing what we’re doing. Process always creates this. It sucks the life out of the natural side of the things we do.
We already have the example of the retrospective, but allow me to elucidate. If a team needs to get together every morning to prioritize the activities of their day, they should stand up, look at each other, and do that. Ideally you would want to be as close as possible to the work in progress (or digital list of work). At some point we decided to name this a, “Daily Stand Up,“ and now I spend most days trying to get teams back to the heart of the purpose of this particular conversation. It breaks my heart to watch teams labor through a status update every morning at 8:15 when this originally started as an energizing and fun huddle where the only agenda was to decide on the day’s most critical outcome.
Here’s another example. If you have done some work to identify a solution that your team could build that solves a customer’s problem, it only makes sense to pull people into a room and discuss your idea so they have the clarity needed to then go and build some type of solution with you. This could be called a Decomposition, or Decomp, meeting. These days I rarely see a great Decomp conversation, but I have written about a particular one that was excellent. My point is this: when I’ve seen great Decomps, the common denominator was that they happened organically because someone had something they wanted to clarify with their team.
Now I can hear the collective groan of process lovers and coaches everywhere. "Tristan, you maniacal monster, we must have process to be efficient, get things done, and SCALE, right!?" My response to that is, “No, no we don’t.” While process can smooth things, the key to scaling is not "more process." The key is better leadership and management where we as leaders and managers step up and don't obviate the role of coaching and leading our organizations.
The hallmark of the retrospectives I mentioned earlier was that they always had a strong facilitator - a leader - guiding the conversation. We only ever need enough process to serve us but not so much that we serve the process. Process can quickly become a proxy for gaps in leadership. In the best times, process is simply a set of “plays” we run so that we build the confidence to customize the play to the circumstances. In other words, process does give us a place to build habits and master skills. Therefore process is an empowerment tool on the way to autonomy that gives us the freedom to choose our own mode of operation.
One last example. Two teams I was coaching were struggling to work together on the same product. The team that had worked on the product the longest was struggling to relinquish ownership. The other team was struggling to discuss or confront that ownership issue. Because of the first team’s ownership issue, the teams were on the brink of creating an approval process for creating changes to the product. As they were hashing out the new process, one of the leaders had an epiphany. What if, instead of adding process, the two teams just got together and had a discussion any time an issue arose? That’s right. Just put the two groups of adults in a room, and let them talk about the issues instead of avoiding those issues by creating a process.
When left unchecked, process becomes a cop-out for healthy leadership and hard conversations.
Maybe the opportunity for creativity lies in the randomness of chaos. Maybe chaos is really what brings about order. Allowing our emotions to reveal gaps which drive great conversation and creativity can feel chaotic and random, but in my experience it is a chaos that we need to embrace. Too often we replace this conversation with more structure or process. Let me be abundantly clear that I am not against process, but there is a time and a place. I spend my days training and coaching teams not on how to add a ton of structure, but on how to keep both feet split across chaos and order which produces creative results that are otherwise unreachable.
Recap
Here are a few key concepts to help reduce the overuse of process and build the trust your team needs to be able to deliver quickly.
Scaling organizations don’t need more process; they need better leadership.
Run the Play: Leaders can offer people process in the form of “plays.” Plays are just the process or set of routines that, once internalized, a team should feel confident to begin customizing to fit the need.
Do the Homework: Leaders can also offer models for decision making in the form of something I call “Homework.” This refers to the continuously groomed set of questions that leaders and teams use to make decisions.
Avoid using process to avoid difficult conversations. Strong leadership and coaching are difficult, but not nearly as difficult as unraveling endless process.
Until next time, keep on learning, keep on growing.