Where did the year go? It seems just last week that I was outlining my plans for 2022, and here we are at the beginning of 2023. It has been a year of ups and downs. I have had a number of successes that I’m proud of. I’ve also had some hope-for outcomes fail to materialize, and some unexpected distractions along the way. Overall, however, it has been as good a year as was possible under the circumstances. And I’m very much looking forward to this next one.
The Ideology of Process
I’ve written a lot about process. I’ve spent a lot of time sharing what good and bad process looks like, and advocating for better process over best process. What I’ve not focused on—which is an interesting oversight—is the mindset and personality of the people who actually build process for a living. This is important, because it goes a long way to explaining why we get the kinds of processes that we do. And what needs to change if we want to get processes that truly work.
Culture is Hard to Build, But Easy to Destroy
Many of us are watching the unfolding drama that is the real-time disintegration of Twitter, as both platform and organization. It is a spectacular example of culture being destroyed after a change in leadership. While Twitter is cultural destruction on a very large scale, the same challenges play out in organizations all the time, particularly as leadership changes. Culture is hard to build and easy to destroy. How do you recover from a cultural stumble?
Embracing Complex & Messy
The work that I specialize in is figuring out viable solutions to complex, messy and challenging projects. It is intense and it is consuming. There are also numerous pitfalls to doing it well. You try to create clarity around something that is inherently unclear. You also need to avoid making it too simple, where simple answers become tempting and potentially create further challenges. Doing this work is as much art as it is science.
How To Become Excellent
Most of us want to be good at what we do. We want to be exceptional. Figuring out what it takes to get there is tough. We need to know what excellence looks like, we need a realistic assessment of where we are and we need insight into how to keep moving forward in a way that supports continued growth. The challenge is that most of our formative learning periods have specific stages and outcomes that signal when we have arrived. The journey to excellence is a little bit more circuitous.
Process Shouldn’t Get In The Way
How people experience working with you depends upon a number of factors. A big part of that is process. As I have written about extensively, process is important. It helps to coordinate, to deliver results, and to codify expectations and principles into guidelines that can be followed. Those benefits tend to be internal to an organization, however. Frustrations and unintended consequences can occur when those same processes bleed to the outside. For those who lead with process, consider this a cautionary tale.