Processes That Live for Themselves
Processes are supposed to turn chaos into predictable outcomes. When done right they make onboarding easy, reduce minor mistakes and let teams scale smoothly.
But there’s another side that often goes unnoticed: processes can begin to live for themselves, consume time, reduce flexibility and turn real work into paperwork.
The Birth of Processes
In a small startup work mostly happens through conversations and quick decisions. People know the goals, they can improvise and they get stuff done together. As the company grows this most likely will not scale: not everyone shares the context, specialization increases, people start making inconsistent choices. So the natural reaction is to introduce some kind of a structure — workflows, responsibilities, checklists. That’s where processes seem to shine and do help: less uncertainty, fewer decisions made on a gut feeling, clearer idea who does what and when.
When Processes Become Selfish
What starts as an enabler can slowly turn into something that exists for its own sake — sucking energy from the team rather than helping to move things forward.
1. Responsibility Dilution
Instead of thinking holistically about the results people start thinking in terms of process steps. Work becomes a conveyor belt where responsibility is passed along. When something goes wrong it’s no longer “our problem” — it’s “the process was not followed”. The process becomes a protective screen, not a framework.
2. The Complexity Trap
As exceptions and edge cases inevitably occur teams add more steps, more roles, more documents to handle all of them. What started as a simple flow becomes a thick forest of boxes and arrows that nobody understands. People spend more hours just trying to follow the process instead of doing meaningful work.
3. Flexibility Lost
Established processes often assume that the future will look like the past. But markets often don’t work that way. If processes are too prescriptive they leave no room for smart judgment. People stop experimenting. They stop adapting. They just follow.
4. The Island Effect
Once roles are set around process people involved begin to protect its turf (read: their own island) with the best intention to help the company. But real effect can vary from internal competition and resistance to change to a slow choke on innovation.
Why This Transformation Happens
There’s a concept often seen in complex organizations called instruction creep — rules and procedures quietly multiply until they’re hard to follow and even harder to change. Each new rule makes sense in isolation but in aggregate they slow down the entire machine.
And once a process becomes rigid it’s emotionally and politically hard to pull back. People invest their identity in it: they designed part of it, they enforce part of it, they report on part of it.
In a Fast Uncertain World…
Companies need processes. Without a structure chaos kills productivity, quality and ability to scale. But if processes start to defend themselves instead of making the company better they’re no longer tools — they become walls.
Real value comes from:
Clarity of purpose, not thickness of the process manual
Principles that guide decisions, not a rulebook for every situation
Empowered people, not people who wait for permission
The balance isn’t no processes vs all processes. It’s enough process to support purpose and not too much that it stops people from doing their best work.
Processes should support thinking, not replace it.
