Working with process gets a bad press in many creative businesses.

Process work is stereotyped as stifling creativity and restricting individual autonomy.

Laying out processes that surface how things are done in a business right now can be a helpful thing to do.

It helps set boundaries for people in their work if done collaboratively. This can help enable autonomy to a degree.

But if you stop there, that’s when process can become a bad thing.

What if you saw that as the starting point for a journey of improvement?

Once you know how things are happening now, then you can start making changes.

Opportunities for innovation and improvement become clearer.

Friction due to inconsistent delivery and repetition previous mistakes is reduced. The business can move faster.

And once you understand process, you can peel back the layers. This’ll reveal what’s really going on.

Behind every documented process there’s a messy mix of humans and technology.

That’s where things get interesting.

It’s where you’ll be able to get to the fundamentals of why your business works the way it does.

And that enables you to work with those realities to drive growth and change.