Trusting the Process: How Good Processes Create Resilient Teams

I’ve always had a strong disdain for the word “process”. It invokes deep dread and my brain automatically conjures an image of myself sitting at a desk, surrounded by stacks of paper towering over me. Like most engineers, I instinctively view processes as unnecessary and wasteful — nothing but red tape that takes time away that could’ve been spent coding and delivering?real?value. An antithesis to creativity, if you will. Why waste time in pointless meetings or documenting things when you could be building products instead?

But what you realize over time is that in order to get work done on a team, some amount of process is not just helpful, but crucial. Not having that kind of structure might be viable for young teams where the focus on cranking out as much code as possible, but as organizations mature and stabilize, this approach becomes unsustainable. You need processes, for example, to distribute work among the team to ensure that everyone’s time is fairly allocated. You need processes to periodically gather feedback to identify issues and bottlenecks. In the agile world, these processes often take the form of “scrum” meetings — planning sessions, retros, daily stand-ups, etc. But most teams, agile or not, usually implement variation of these.

All of this makes process a double edged sword. Some process is understandable, even critical. But this needs to be balanced so that the red tape doesn’t get in the way of your team delivering what they’re supposed to. Process needs to be designed so that it helps your team become more effective, and not hinder your mission of serving your customers. Processes need to be thought and re-thought until they’re doing what they’re meant to do, and people aren’t just “going through the motions”.?

But beyond these somewhat obvious reflections, another reality that I’m coming to appreciate is that?good?processes also offer a sense of stability and durability. The unfortunate reality is that people don’t stay in one place forever. While people are absolutely critical and form the heart and soul of any team, most will — in spite of your best efforts — eventually move on to different opportunities. Over your tenure at any company, you will see several people come and go. That makes it all the more important to not let your culture be defined by just a handful of people. The team, and by extension the organization, should have an identity beyond it’s constitutents. In that sense, these mechanisms, along with the team’s core values and mission, form at least part of their identity.

Well thought out mechanisms go even further by turning the team into a cohesive structure — where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Good mechanisms ensure that the team is not left blind sided by sudden departures. They ensure that mistakes are caught, and early, without always relying on any one individual. Checklists, SOPs, planning documents, are all useful tools for adding checks and balances to the system to minimize the risk of error.?

In his book?Antifragile, Nassim Taleb proposed an interesting idea. The best systems are those that designed to not only?survive?a failure, but to come back even stronger. With every failure, the system learns to adapt and becomes more resilient, in effect becoming antifragile. This applies to system design just as well to teams of people. The best teams are those that are not only able to survive difficult times, but also able to learn from their mistakes and implement mechanisms to ensure that they don’t fail the same way ever again.

In the long run,?good mechanisms always trump good intentions.