After I published last week's post, I got a note from Jeff Griffiths asking why I think we in the business world regularly put so much emphasis on process. Among other things, he wrote, "I think the reason organizations always seem to revert to process is that developing people and actively managing competency is hard work, and most front-line leaders aren’t trained to do it, and they certainly aren’t invited to do it. What’s your experience been?"
Of course he's right. But his note got me thinking. And the longer I thought about it, the more reasons I could see that organizations choose to emphasize process development.
In the first place, of course, there are the undeniable benefits of the process approach. A process focus supports continual improvement, by letting you understand the overall flow of your operations so you can see where there are blockages. A process focus permits standardization across functions or locations. A process focus facilitates interaction of multiple functions across an organization. And a process focus makes possible the "checklist effect," which enhances the performance even of deeply trained experts like pilots and surgeons. All of these are good things. Nothing that follows is meant to minimize any of these genuine benefits, and I would never suggest that you try to do without defined processes!
But there are other reasons for the focus on process, and not all of these reasons are so obviously wholesome.
One reason, for example, is that Quality professionals — people like me — push the process approach so hard. That (in turn) is because the process approach is a major focus of the ISO 9001 standard. Section 0.3 of the Introduction is about nothing else. In the normative sections of ISO 9001:2015 (I mean chapters 4-10), the word process or processes occurs 57 times. By contrast: competence or competent occurs 9 times, training occurs twice, people occurs once, and skills shows up only in Annex B (well outside the normative chapters). So organizations can be forgiven for thinking that process is something they have to emphasize.
Another reason is that organizations know how to write processes — even if they don't follow all my advice from last summer, they can write something that's good enough to get by — but they often don't know how to develop their people. As Griffiths wrote to me, most front-line leaders aren't trained to do it. I can personally confirm that when I first became a manager, nobody took me aside to train me how to develop my people — nor even to give me some basic pointers. Of course there are companies that are happy to step in to help with the task — Griffiths himself works for one — but it seems like there aren't nearly enough of them, and of course none of them works for free.
Related to the foregoing is the simple fact that a process focus is easier and cheaper than a competence focus. A process focus is narrow and finite, while a competence focus is potentially infinite — there's always room to learn more and get better. This means that a process focus is easier to replicate at scale, and therefore supports expansion.
For example, McDonald's is well-known as a process-focused business. Everyone knows that McDonald's has defined an exact procedure for every aspect of running each restaurant. The result is that McDonald's has spread across the globe, with more than 37,000 stores in 120 countries. What is more, the food they serve (with the exception of minor regional specialties) is absolutely uniform. When you place an order in a McDonald's, you know what you are going to get.
Contrast this with a restaurant that is not so process-focused, such as Le Bernardin in New York City. No doubt Le Bernardin uses some recipes, and there must be procedures for how to take reservations or manage the flow of customers. But there is also room for a cook to express personal artistry. And while Le Bernardin has been — in its class and with respect to its own (very different) criteria — every bit as successful as McDonald's, nonetheless there is only one.
For a more dramatic example, consider the situation of American war materiel when the country first entered World War Two. Nearly all weapons required precision optical sighting devices to aim them, and the best lenses in the world were all ground in Germany by deeply trained experts who had served long years of apprenticeship. So far as anyone knew at the time, that was the only way to get lenses ground. Peter Drucker tells the story:
Belief in the mystery of craft and skill persisted, as did the assumption that long years of apprenticeship were needed to acquire both. Indeed, Hitler went to war with the United States on the strength of that assumption. Convinced that it took five years or more to train optical craftsmen (whose skills are essential to modern warfare), he thought it would be at least that long before America could field an effective army and air force in Europe—and so declared war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
We know now [Frederick W.] Taylor was right. The United States had almost no optical craftsmen in 1941. And modern warfare indeed requires precision optics in large quantities. But by applying Taylor’s methods of scientific management, within a few months the United States trained semiskilled workers to turn out more highly advanced optics than even the Germans were producing, and on an assembly line to boot. And by that time, Taylor’s first-class men with their increased productivity were also making a great deal more money than any craftsman of 1911 had ever dreamed of.
(You can find Drucker's article, from which these paragraphs are extracted, here. There is a short video about the same topic, made in 1945, available here.)
In short, there are powerful motives pushing businesses to adopt a process focus, even if it comes at the expense of putting similar effort into developing their people. And yet we saw last week that in the long run, investment in people is more important than investment in process. At the level of the individual firm, this is something to watch. Be careful that you don't overemphasize an approach that will give you only a limited return on your investment.
There are also implications for how we understand the broader economy, and in particular for how we Quality professionals practice our craft. I will address both of those topics next week.
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