Welcome to Dalton Plus Michael. Today we're going to talk about, we might even debate slightly. Process. Procedure

the P word.

Bureaucracy. Meetings. And the kind of, the prompt for this one is confusing an organized process with an effective process and confusing chaos with ineffective or bad outcomes.

Yeah, I mean, I think the context here is you and I have debated this for many years as colleagues.

Would people guess which... I don't know that people...

Yeah, what do you think? Who's the pro process and anti-process?

Yes, and who's the chaos guy? I think they would assume I'm the chaos guy. I think they might. People who know me would never.

It's a great point. You're right. I actually have no idea if people understand that I'm the anti-process guy and that you're the pro-process guy. I don't know if that's obvious. Beats me, man.

And so, yeah, so the general debate is Michael would be like, oh, we need a structured process to do X, Y, and Z. And I'm like, why? That sounds bad.

We would end in many different places. But it was always an interesting debate because it was always a I always liked the debate because process should always be treated skeptically.

Yeah, otherwise it'll take over.

Someone has to be the devil's advocate for any new process, and you played that role.

Fair enough.

So how do people think about useful process versus bad process?

Useful process, to argue the opposite side that I'm usually on. Useful process is the following. Once a best practice exists, you should just do the best practice. Otherwise, you're just wasting a ton of time. Think about automation, like the Industrial Revolution, where if there's one way to make a bolt on an assembly line, just keep making the bolts. Those bolts are going to be better in every way than a bespoke welder trying to make a bolt by hand. And so process in its best form is just establishing a state-of-the-art best practice and ramping it way up. And there's no question about how to do something properly.

Well, like, process in its best form. I love that bolt example. Produces a great bolt.

Which is better. Yeah, it's perfect. And the process identifies errors. Like, part of the process of making the bolt is the camera detects, oh, this bolt's bad. And it throws it off the assembly line. So, yeah, an assembly line is an example of fantastic process.

A great test for whether you have a good process is the outcome good. And getting better.

And consistent. And you know it's provably good. Like you can actually measure that it's effective.

What about bad process?

Bad process is just like any classic bureaucracy where it exists to grow itself. It's almost like a, dare I say cancer, where it's a machine that all it wants is to have more power or more people in the process. And it becomes a vector to basically take over everything such that You know, someone has to weigh in on every decision and has control over how decisions are made. There's a whole lot of people employed and trying to keep the process going. It's like a jobs program. And so you can end up with a process becomes this big 🤲 and the actual product is this big 🤏. It'd be like if at the bolt factory, there was a thousand process people and one guy making bolts.

And one bolt a day comes out of the factory.

That would be bad process.

I think an interesting thing about process is when people reach for it as a solution. And I can say from personal experience, There are a couple different times where I reach for it as a solution. So one is like the same problem keeps happening. The second is fear or anxiety. If I'm doing something for the first time and I'm afraid that it's not going to work, sometimes process gives me comfort. Well, have I made a plan? Like, you know, if I'm cooking something for the first time, have I looked up recipes and da, da, da, da. So personal fear and anxiety, but I also think fear and anxiety for other people. Like I actually think process can reduce anxiety, That doesn't necessarily mean the output will be good. But I do think that a lot of process comes from people being afraid and anxious and wanting the comfort. And chaos might be comforting when the results good. It's rarely comforting during the chaos. Especially for a certain type of people, it's often in anxiety inducing during the chaos.

On the flip side though, what's so funny is if you were to ask me to think back through the biggest innovations or things that have triggered the biggest innovations or change or positive things, they've all started with chaos. They've all started with something breaking and having to not follow Whatever the plan was.

My mental model for this is the more something looks like producing bolts, the more process works, and the more that it looks like producing art or a hit song, the less you can be like, here's our, here's our process. And that, and again, if you think about what people are mad about with, you know, the entertainment industry, Hollywood or the music industry, it's process seeping its way to you.

Yes. Like Avengers movie.

That's like, that's process screwing up art. and so that's the continuum is how much is this art and how much is this a bolt.

I like that because if I if I go back to my new favorite term MBA vacation. There is this kind of theory that any output could be optimized with process and like. Yeah, if you can make a hit movie with that process, I feel to make a better movie with great process.

Yeah, let's just license some comic book guys.

Get Brad Pitt.

And that's literally the entertainment industry these days. It's like MBA-ification of creating art.

Yes. And so I think that it's tricky because to your point, it's funny, because when you're seeing art, I might say innovation. Process makes it kind of hard to invent a new way of doing things. When you need to invent a new way of doing things, you kind of need the freedom to maybe do stuff that's unpopular, that is scary, that may be more expensive than people, right? All the things that process tried to control for.

And so I think what gets tricky is like, okay, sometimes I need to be using my creative brain, sometimes I need to be using my bolt brain. How do I choose, right? And it's like, Well, you know, when you're trying to do your, you know, fundraising paperwork, I probably will be using my bolt for it. You're gonna have to write up your own legal docs for first principles. But like, if I'm trying to make my customer service go better, am I innovating?

I mean, you definitely want to measure it like it's bolts. Like I think for a lot of process, you want to start with measurement.

I agree. But like, do you just want to hire the customer service guy from the other company?

It's not a bad place to start.

It's tricky though.

Yeah. Yeah. I understand.

It's tricky. Like I always kind of will ask a founder, where are the top three places you want to innovate? Like, like you probably can't innovate across 20 zones. If you think customer service is going to be your differentiator, maybe you don't hire that 20 year person, but if it ain't, Like, you know, where do you want to put your innovation points?

I also think that there's something about process as a lover of process. I love iterating process. Like one of the things I really enjoy is, okay, the factory is producing bolts too slow. How do we tweak the factory? And I think that sometimes when I encounter people who don't like process, they don't engage in iterating the process. And so it's a tricky thing because like some of these things have to be done bulky. And if you're not tweaking it and fixing it, so now you've got a bad factory. You know, it's like, we know a lot of people who are like, no meetings ever. And then it's like, and no written specs. Cause I don't want to be hailing.

I mean, this may be two in the weeds, but I think a great example of good process is, um, code reviews.

Yeah. A written spec?

No, let's go to the spec part. But basically, the default thing it started does is everyone can just ship to production and then you break the website. And then you're like, yeah, maybe not that. And you have to do a couple of layers before you can ship to production.

I might even argue just staging. But I think this is an interesting point where it's kind of like being too extreme on either side screws you. Like I think what was so fun working together is that we could play like process dude and like chaos dude because we knew the middle would be in like, we would kind of get the best of both worlds. I think that both of us without the other one that would have had to be a little bit more in the middle.

I think that's well said. And where this comes into play, when you think about it, for a lot of folks out there is Innovator's Dilemma, which is a lot of businesses that are gonna get killed by AI disruptors, they're gonna have to ignore all the process, people, right? This is, you know, to recap Innovator's Dilemma for everybody, it's if a business is really successful doing A and then this new B thing comes out and it seems potentially disruptive, Businesses will tend not to do B, even though they know they should because it screws up A. Like there's too many stakeholders that are excited about doing A and that's the whole business is A. So why would we blow up our own business?

It opens the door, right? It opens the armor in the business. It's funny because that can happen for startups too. I was talking to a startup in the kind of ed tech space and, you know, AI is enabling the Duke things that inconceivable two years ago. But they were saying to me like, oh, well, the kids really want to, they really want to read Pokemon books. But of course we can't show them Pokemon because of the copyright. And I'm like, I respect Pokemon, I respect copyright for the record.

Okay. All right. I duly noted my problems. It's on the record.

I think my record is muddy on this topic. But like, It was interesting that like a Google style of hairfulness was being applied by a startup whose sole job was to explore the risky paths. And I think like this is a kind of meta point that I keep on telling founders is like, hey, the, the, the beautifully blazed straight, like autobahn style road, the big company gets to walk that road. You are chopping down things and you're in the four, you're blazing the path and like you might have to bend some rules to base that path. But if you're walking the autobahn path, They're gonna run you over every time. You represent the risk in the economy. That is your job. You're the risk. Embrace it. Because when you don't embrace it, you're just lying to yourself. You still are the risk, even when you're walking the Autobahn.

Yeah. Amen.

So it was an interesting thing. I think I convinced him to let the kids read Pokemon books. All right, that sounds like a good wrap up.