Five Processes View

“Rules are not made by the government, rules are made by the people executing them” a taxi driver in Asia once told me.”

I love to travel around the world and I am amazed how other people handle everyday challenges completely differently in other cultures. Besides competencies and motivation, the taken path to a successful solution depends on the surrounding context, regulations and options. When a government or a higher organizational body discusses clear paths and rules, people obviously find different ways to behave within them. Some follow, others have shortcuts, and some violate rules.

For me, the question arises as to whether it is at all possible to establish company processes that do not automatically result in a violation of the rules.

Process journey

To keep it simple, my image for processes in organizations can be associated with travel journals: As with any trip, a destination should be set. Usually, employees are given such goals based on their job, role, position, function and skill-set. As so called “travelers” they approach their destination with every step they execute in a process. The authorities provide the travelers with a precise route, stopovers, budget, authorizations and actions they have to follow. Sometimes in a very linear way, sometimes with guidelines and sometimes with freedom.

In most cases, employees can easily align with process following manuals or handbooks. However, with increasing complexity, dependencies, paradox situations or external interference, there is a likelihood plans will break somewhere along the way.

Violating standard processes and coming up with a creative solution can help to reach given targets in uncertain context. Broken processes can even become frustrating, harmful to the employee, the company, business and customers.

In this picture, each action in a process represents a node in a network. The everyday travelers aim for their destination and individually navigate for suitable routes through this complex system of possibilities.

If you have a chance to ask these travelers about their journey they might come up with five categories of journey they encounter on a daily basis.

Follow / proven

“I followed a proven path and as always I arrived at my destination!”

Assuming that employees want to do their best in their jobs and fulfill their tasks, it can be assumed that they are very likely to prefer routes that are useful to reach a goal. This provides a sense of security by aligning with the company’s processes.

Such processes are usually fast, short, straightforward, simple and have few dependencies.

For companies, this path is likely to be the “desired” one. All specifications and rules aim to be useful. Process descriptions and action corridors are well-defined to help employees to perform their jobs.

Execute / dysfunctional

“As expected, I did not achieve my goal by executing these instructions!”

These ways are perceived as frustrating because there is a strong (known) chance these processes are useless or exhausting for achieving a goal. The manual is only complied to follow a secure path in alignment with the company’s rules to avoid trouble with the authorities.

Processes of this type can often be slow, long, unmanageable, complicated, or are characterized by inter-dependencies.

A process or action perceived as dysfunctional can be damaging to a company, because they reduce “efficiency”, demotivate employees to the point of inner resignation and can reduce customer satisfaction and growth opportunities.

A classic example might be an order of office supplies in an over- regulated internal process. A lot of paperwork, waiting time, involved people, shipping between warehouses, signatures and at the end the desired €1 material arrives six weeks after ordering.

Hack / worthwhile

“I arrived, had difficulties on the way and had to diverge from the given plan!”

For a fulfilling and useful goal, employees may take on an unsecure path and are willing to violate defined rules and obstacles for the sake of a higher goal.

Given processes are adapted to new requirements and conditions according to the situation.

These informal processes may be silently executed in one part of an organization and “invisible” to another part of the organization. Likewise, these processes can create a false impression of dysfunctional processes because they are visibly perceived as “proven”.

An illustrative example of this can be hospitals, where rules prevent medications from being stored on stations, but employees might still do this in order to be able to medicate patients quickly.

Cheat / damaging

“As expected, I missed the goal and ended up hurting the company!”

With such a journey, two factors come together: An employee knows that this path is useless and ultimately frustrating. The execution violates processes and rules and is unsafe for the employee.

Processes in this sector are likely to be isolated cases in an organization and caused by accidents, paradoxical requirements, or intentional harmful actions.

Usually such an action leads to court and is prosecuted and causes significant damage to the company.

Emergent

“I entered unknown land and had to find my way.”

Journeys originating in this transitional sector are unknown to the company. They test the stability and structure of business-models. Besides dangers they also create opportunities for change and value.

At this path questions arise: Can an organization ensure that employees act in a way that is appropriate to the situation? What actions may an employee perform to achieve goals under these unknown and new conditions? Do existing processes have to be changed or do the new conditions even put a company in danger?

This transitional journey is characterized by the fact that the emergent situation is only briefly undefined and quickly moves into one of the other sectors. Such processes may also be implicit and hidden in the company.

A good example of this is the Covid-19 pandemic, as many companies were forced by the new conditions to reorganize their cooperation and customer relationships, both technically and in terms of processes.

Different perspectives lead to different understanding

Even a frustrating employee journey that follows a useless and dysfunctional outcome might be relevant from the management perspective.

Imagine this scenario:

An important position in your department is open and you are urgently looking for a new talent. You have interviewed several candidates and you find a professionally experienced and suitable person for the role who would fit perfectly into your team.

HR takes over the candidate, and she is classified as a “special case” because her final study grade is below the defined requirements.

Special cases need to be confirmed by management. However, management gives their approval two weeks later.

By the time approval is given and the contract is ready, the candidate already has a new job.

From your perspective, the process might be dysfunctional and might put stress on you and your team. You’ve spend a lot of time but the position is still open and you might ask your team to cover the extra work, spend more time to find a new suitable talent for your team.

From management and HR perspective, the process is proven and total fulfilled the reason the process exists for. The candidate was approved even she didn’t fulfill the preconditions as an employee in your company.

Often, there is also a third perspective on the companies processes. Customers or like in this case a job candidates. As known the impression of the process is not applicable to all processes, but the candidate has an experience with the company and may pass this outcome on to others.Each process had a good reason why it was introduced first and might respond as the right answer to the initial condition. Over time conditions change, rules with good intentions may become dysfunctional and could harm the business and people.

Transpose existing patterns

As shown, the result of a process may be rated differently by changing the perspectives. The five process journeys model can help to make these views easy to discuss, identify existing patterns and learn from experienced journeys to take action.

Reveal worthwhile processes
- share them
- make them “proven”

Questioning dysfunctional processes
- adopt to new conditions
- remove them

Investigate damaging processes
- address them
- find the cause
- remove them

Emerging processes
- empower
- find solutions

In order to enable processes that are appropriate to complex situations, the improvement of processes and activities ideally is a continuous collective task in a safe environment across the entire company.

The employees as organizational travelers experience the usefulness of processes every day and know their outcomes.

But don’t ask: “Tell me, what’s going wrong?”. As explained before, in fear of consequences they will remain silent and hide their path to avoid punishment. You need empathy, sensitivity, and patience to get to this point.

Make patterns transparent

Empower people to share their experiences in a transparent way without blaming them.

Even for companies not working in an agile way, it might be a good idea to initiate regular common retrospectives in your company, business units, teams or projects. The time invested is usually worth the money, because it spreads valuable information about how people in the company work together and what they think and feel.

It is a good practice to communicate common findings and solutions and share the gained knowledge. Try to start a constructive dialog about opinions and other solutions.

Try experiments

Kill “stupid” rules and improve your processes by executing experiments. Start dedicated experiments by:

- Defining assumptions about what will change or the impact of following the new way
- Briefly formulating the new process / action
- Defining how to validate success and failure of the experiment
- Set a time frame on how long the experiment will be executed

Take small steps and try not to start too many experiments at the same time. Otherwise, it might be difficult to determine the effect of a single experiment and results may be influenced.

Try to sell the experiments and find volunteers who are willing to do it first and share the outcomes of experiments with all employees in the company.

Conclusion

The five journey model derives from Niklas Luhmann’s model of “useful illegality” (“brauchbare Illegalität in formalen Organisationen”) and an extended model from Martin Permantier and Jens Hollman.

I consider this model as extremely useful in my work with clients. It is simple to understand and enables the connection to daily experienced patterns and views.

This model helps me to show improvement potential to my clients by giving them a language for their process experiences and makes them the object of discussions.

I hope this model can also help you with your change projects.
Cheers, Heinz