Pinpointing and Pruning Pointless Processes

Painting harbours taught me about pruning processes.

Suggests Ólafur Waage:

“In a normal Harbour in Iceland, the edge line is usually painted yellow, and the electrical box is usually painted grey.

When I was young, I was hired by my hometown harbour to paint their edge line yellow. However, I spilt the yellow paint all over the grey electrical box, so I just painted the box yellow too and thought nobody would notice.

That box today: yes, they keep painting it yellow. Only my harbour does this. And, it's been so long that they probably don't know why they paint their box yellow - it's just something they do now.”

Something in my head clicked.

Often, as organisations grow, so does the effort required to get things done. But this needn’t be the case.

Processes are a way of increasing the predictability of achieving a desired outcome. Yet, processes often outlast both their creator and their usefulness.

We may introduce daily team meetings because a new team has been facing many obstacles to getting work done, or additional checks because we’ve seen some mistakes repeat themselves.

However, at some point the world will change: the obstacles the new team faced may disappear, or the cause of mistakes may be removed. Yet, the meetings persist, and the checks continue. This is often because the creator has moved on, and the ‘why’ (or intended effect) behind the processes has been forgotten.

When we realise we’re not getting the results we want, it becomes tempting to add more processes instead of tuning or pruning what’s already there. The growing Jenga tower of processes further reduces predictability, and increases the effort required to get things done.

The takeaway? Record the ‘why’ behind processes so they can be tuned or pruned, else we may protect pointless procedures - and yellow boxes.

Note: this article was inspired by Waage. Quotes adapted for brevity.