I know the value of good processes to reduce the chaos and avoid repeated mistakes. Many smaller business could benefit from some level of processification. Large corporations could, on the other hand, benefit from a reduction or loosening up of their processes.
Good processes by their nature seek to retard thinking - especially holistic thinking that accounts for matters outside those processes.
Good processes make organisations stupid!
Together with a fear-based punitive culture, the blind following of rules destroys an organisations agility. It stops the organisation from leveraging the full richness of human ingenuity, empathy, and creativity; precisely at a time when the world is presenting more and more never-before-anticipated or encountered challenges.
Large organisations have been designed to function as factories. This was appropriate in the previous age of standardisation and repetition. People are replaceable cogs. The process is the factory template into which they plugged. The process is the king to be served and fed.
This is why organisations fail often in customer service. I have had an unnecessary kafuffle with my Internet connectivity with a telco recently. A classic case of process failure. Different service people had different information. Different opposing actions were carried out by different departments, at different times. with no synchronisation with any other department. Ad nauseum. A merry-go-round of stupidity.
The people are nice and understanding. But they had extremely limited powers to act. The process had to be followed. But the process was in itself broken. Everyone knew this. But no one could fix it.
