Disciplined processes for resilient growth

I know I sound like a broken record. Whether we're talking about training, leadership or how we communicate with our teams, I end up saying the same thing: that's the process. How you send an email is a process. How you answer the phone is a process. I also know the pushback: "Paul, I'm not a robot." You can't just follow four steps and expect them to make the decision for you.

Fair enough. So let me be clear about what I mean.

Methodical and disciplined, not robotic

A good process is methodical and disciplined. It isn't rigid, stuffy, limiting or slow. There are two kinds. Soft processes cover how we make decisions, how we communicate and how we gather feedback from each other. Hard processes are closer to a recipe. If I'm baking a cake, there's a recipe. If I'm at P&G making Tide, I follow a recipe. We need both to get predictability, consistency and high quality out of a business, and that's also where resilience comes from.

Three-hour days and ten-hour days

Around 2006 or 2007, I was a subcontracted software developer helping a regional airline build a new architecture for its flight scheduling system. Pilots, co-pilots, flight attendants and the planes themselves all run on different schedules, from Cincinnati to Chicago to LA and back. There's a lot of complexity.

I'd always been taught to work with a process when writing software. It let me test my work, prove out different scenarios and keep the design simple. About five months into a year-long project, my module was done. Testing turned up three or four issues, and I resolved each one in an hour or two.

Some of my teammates were working without that discipline. They had many more errors, and their code had become so complex it was hard to see how to fix anything. During testing, I was working three-hour days. They were working ten. "My process created certainty, created predictability about what my code would do." I was relaxed. They were stressed, starting to realize they might not deliver no matter how much more time they got.

Room for creativity, and speed

Was I a robot? No. Inside that process was space for high creativity. I was being "uber creative inside my process to build a simple system that produces certain outcomes." An artist works the same way. The painting may look inspired, even chaotic, but there's a process underneath that gives them room to create.

It wasn't slow, either. It was faster, and that compounds across every person, department and discipline in your business into a competitive advantage. Jocko Willink says discipline equals freedom. Deming says quality goes up, costs go down. My quality was up, and I didn't have to bill five more months.

Start by making it visible

You don't need to write a process for everything. Start in the moment, when you're working through something with someone on your team, and ask:

• Is this useful to remember?

• Will it help me communicate this to others, so we don't have this discussion every time?

• How do I make it visible right now?

Visible can be a few boxes on a whiteboard, photographed and dropped into a shared drive or Slack. It can be a one-page document with the aim and the five steps. Spend half an hour, an hour at most. Writing it down improves the process on its own, because you have to think through the aim, the steps, what makes it successful and where the waste is.

Keep at it for a month and you'll have a core set of processes. You'll probably over-document at first, and that's okay. Over time you'll find that about 20% of your processes drive 80% of your business.

Where resilience comes from

Growth is easy to survive without processes. The test comes at the plateau, or when something unexpected hits: a recession, a major customer leaving, a labor crunch, inflation. That's when a business without methodical, disciplined processes gets shaky. Processes also give you the capacity to innovate, and for many of you, they're how you'll handle succession.

Listen to the full episode of Resilience Talk, and if this resonates, subscribe to my newsletter.