Process

A lot of process in companies just exists to ensure mental processing happens (i.e. understanding what’s happening and why, what affect you’re having on the employees around you, why customers are happy or unhappy etc).

The reason we create processes to ensure this happens is that many people don’t process unless forced to, and even if they do, they often only process part of what they need to. And even if they do process a lot, they don’t have many experiences to help them make the quality decisions that are needed. And so processes exist to solve this. They structure in time to think about important questions and to get perspectives needed to make good decisions. A relevant example — we create processes to approve a new hire because it forces people to understand what types of hires are good investments and why, whether the company can afford this hire, and what the right structure is to bring them on. It may feel like extra work, but if it does, the person assuming so may believe they’re already doing all the mental processing to understand all these questions and if you really lay out all the considerations and questions that need to be asked to make a good decision, they may realize why the processes is actually necessary.