Process as Proxy and the Fetish of Technique
Is methodology serving a purpose or has it become an “Irrational Ritual”?
Get in touch… — https://tomconnor.me/
Well run organisations rely on systems, process’s and rituals to help standardise best practice. Paradigm’s of the industry have their systems held up as key differentiators of their success. Formula’s to be copied and emulated if your business is to compete in the global market. Metrics are put in place around these systems to track progress and compliance — “What gets measured gets managed” and the performance of individual team members including their pay and bonus’s, linked to the achievement of these metrics.
By necessity often these metrics are measuring something peripheral to the core business outcome they are tracking as this is often easier or quicker to measure — and this is where processes and systems can start to lead a business astray. Think how we might track the number of audits and actions completed, not whether the audit and actions materially improved the safety, process or economics outcomes of the business.
Jeff Bezos calls this out in his 2017 letter to shareholders
“A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process.
The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us?
Long before Bezos and Amazon dominated the world of retail this concept was published by David Wastell in 1996 with the wonderful title — “The fetish of technique: methodology as a social defense”. Wastell calls out how methodology’s can become all consuming for a business, potentially losing sight of more important core metrics and forming a social defense against poor outcomes. From the abstract:
The argument is thus, that methodology, although its influence may be benign, has the potential to operate as a ‘social defence’, i.e. as a set of organizational rituals with the primary function of containing anxiety. The grandiose illusion of an all-powerful method allows practitioners to deny their feelings of impotence in the face of the daunting technical and political challenges of systems development. By withdrawing into this fantasy world the learning processes that are critical to the success of systems development are jeopardized.
Methodology, whilst masquerading as the epitome of rationality, may thus operate as an irrational ritual, the enactment of which provides designers with a feeling of security and efficiency at the expense of real engagement with the task at hand.
David Proven and Drew Rae discuss this further in their podcast Ep.89 When is the process more important than the outcome? | The Safety of Work
This is a terrific challenge to keep an eye out in your business. Are their process’s and rituals that might be providing a cover for poor performance. Have they morphed beyond their original design intent? Maybe the business environment is different and they no longer serve the purpose they did when introduced. Can you use the challenge from Bezos:
The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us?
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Get in touch… — https://tomconnor.me/
If you liked this then check out…
- Systems Archetypes- Places to intervene — An advantage with using systems archetypes as a problem solving methodology is that places to intervene in the system can be thought through and played with.
- The OODA Loop — Getting ahead of your competition
- Your Operating System-is it delivering ? — How can you begin to understand the Operating system of your organisation?
- Building a culture of full disclosure — How does a work place culture allow people to speak up, highlight important issues and opportunities to improve?
