Nobody can redesign a process while they are the one running it

There is a sentence I hear in almost every business I am asked to look at. Someone explains a process that takes four people and three days, and then adds: "that's just how it works."

They are not being defensive. They are describing something that has been true for as long as they have been there. And it is that quiet certainty — that the current way is simply what the work is — that costs businesses more than any single bad decision.

Where the process actually came from

Ask where a process came from and you rarely get an answer about design. You get history.

Someone built the spreadsheet in 2016 because the system could not do it. The approval step was added after a mistake that nobody now remembers the details of. The report exists because a former director wanted it on a Monday. The double-entry into two systems started as a temporary measure during a migration that finished years ago.

None of these were decisions about how the business should run. They were responses to circumstances — most of which no longer exist. But the responses outlived the circumstances, and somewhere along the way they stopped being a workaround and became the procedure. New staff are trained in it. It goes in the handbook. It acquires the authority of something that was chosen.

Very little of how a typical business operates was actually designed. Most of it accumulated.

Why it becomes invisible

Here is the part I find genuinely difficult to work around, because it is not a failure of intelligence or effort.

You cannot audit a process while you are the one executing it.

The person doing the reconciliation is thinking about this month's figures, not about why reconciliation is necessary. The owner chasing an approval is thinking about getting the job out of the door, not about who decided approval was needed. Attention is fully consumed by the content of the work, which leaves nothing for the shape of it.

And the busier a business is, the more complete the effect. A quiet business has room to wonder whether things could be different. A business at capacity has none — every hour is committed to producing the thing, and the question "should we be producing it this way?" has nowhere to sit. So the businesses under the most operational pressure, the ones with the most to gain from a redesign, are precisely the ones least able to step back and consider one.

That is the circle. Not complacency — capacity.

The gap between the operation and the system

The most useful thing I look for is the distance between how a business actually operates and what its systems think it does.

That gap is where the cost lives, and it is almost always filled with people. Someone re-keys the order because the two systems do not talk. Someone maintains a spreadsheet because the report does not exist. Someone chases a status because there is nowhere to see it. Someone rebuilds the same figures every month because nobody trusts the ones the system produces.

Every one of those is a person acting as an integration layer. It is skilled work, it is quietly heroic, and it is completely invisible on the P&L — because it is not a line item. It is spread thinly across salaries that are already being paid.

Which is exactly why nobody costs it. The spreadsheet appears free. It is not free; it costs a day a month, forever, plus the risk that the only person who understands it leaves.

What technology actually changes

The usual mistake is to treat technology as a way of doing the existing process faster. That is the smallest thing it offers, and often the least valuable.

What it genuinely changes is which processes need to exist at all.

If two systems exchange data directly, the reconciliation is not quicker — it is gone, along with the errors it was there to catch. If status is visible, the chasing is not more efficient — there is nothing to chase. If the report generates itself from the source, the three people who rebuilt it monthly are not faster; they have been handed three days back.

That is the difference between automating a process and removing the need for it. The first improves a step. The second deletes it. Only the second changes the economics of the business.

And it works the other way too, which is the part that keeps me honest: if a process should not exist, automating it is worse than leaving it alone. It becomes cheap enough that nobody will ever question it again, and it will still be running in five years, costing a maintenance budget and everyone's attention.

Why the owner is the worst-placed person to see it

Owner-managed businesses have a particular version of this problem, and it is structural rather than personal.

The owner usually designed the original process, which makes it harder to see as a choice rather than a fact. They are often still inside it, doing the work. And they carry the memory of why each step exists, which means every step has a justification available — even where the justification expired years ago.

Nobody in the business is going to raise it, either. Staff who find a process frustrating assume there is a reason for it, because there usually was one once. Questioning it feels like criticising the person who built it. So it holds, unexamined, and the cost compounds quietly.

Breaking the circle

You do not need a transformation programme. You need to interrupt the pattern for one process, deliberately.

Name one process and write down what it actually costs. Not what it should take — what it takes. Hours per month, error rate, how often it has to be redone. Most businesses have never put a number to any of this, which is why nobody can tell whether a change helped.

Ask where each step came from. Not whether it is useful — where it came from. Steps that nobody can trace to a live reason are the first candidates, and there are usually more of them than anyone expects.

Apply the clean-sheet test. If we were starting this business today, knowing what we know, would we design it this way? The honest answer is usually no, and the gap between that answer and current practice is the size of the opportunity.

Get someone outside the doing to look. Not because they know your business better — they do not — but because they are not mid-way through executing it. That is the only real advantage an outsider has, and it is enough.

The point

Almost every business is carrying processes that were never designed, that outlived their reason, and that cost real money spread so thinly nobody has ever added it up.

The reason they persist is not stubbornness. It is that the people best placed to see them are fully occupied running them. Stepping outside that circle takes a deliberate act — and about a day of honest measurement is usually enough to start.