My friend (and co-founder at Nukona) Chris has an awesome saying: “Once you achieve excellence, process gives you repeatability. If you never achieve excellence, then process is just something to fill the day.” I’ll leave the topic of excellence to another post, and instead stick to the topic of process.

Having a “process” means having a defined way of processing a set of inputs. Those inputs meet some criteria for the process to be deemed applicable. When you implement a process, you make the decision that your process will be applicable over a range of input values — that you will give the exact same treatment (the process) to all values in the universe of applicable input values.

Think about this — your shinny new process is a billboard that screams “I will be (almost) always suboptimal in the way that I process these inputs!” Yep, that’s right — you just decided to suck (at handling these inputs). Assuming variance in the inputs, process is the opposite of optimization.

The two most common failings I see around the application of process in business are:

1. Failing to understand that process and optimization are two sides of the same coin, and that both have value when applied appropriately. Both are tools.
2. Seeing process as a single knob or slider for the entire organizational context, rather than seeing it as a tool (like a hammer).

Let’s deal with the first failing. As explained above, the act of relegating something to process means that you’ll accept consistently suboptimal outcomes for that something. The upside of doing this is that you will no longer have to spend mental energy/focus on that something — the process will ensure that an acceptable outcome occurs. This is a huge win! If many problems are flying at you, process allows you to drastically reduce the number of problems to which you must apply focus.

Optimization, is the opposite. Focus is required, and you can’t focus on everything. So the key is to decide where the value is — do a priority sort. Relegate everything that isn’t high priority to process. This gives you the quantum of focus that you need in order to optimize for the problems that are of highest priority.

Now for the second failing. When you hear someone say “we’re a big company, we need more process here”, or “we’re a small company — we can’t afford too much process here” — you are listening to an idiot. In any organization, there is much in flight at any given point of time. Understanding what merits optimization and what doesn’t is key to running a tight ship. This stays true as the organization scales, although the criteria for deserving focus changes.

Knowing that these two tools are available and that they can be applied by design is powerful. They can also be combined. For example, wrap a basic checklist around what you choose to optimize, just to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks. People make mistakes, even when focused. Have formal criteria within a process to call for optimization when a threshold is exceeded. Design you system using both process and optimization, understanding the relationship between them.