Getting Process Out of the Black Box

The first three weeks after Emmett (our third son) was born, were unusually smooth. And then I went back to work.

Maybe I’m just a novice and I should’ve expected brother-brother conflict while our two older sons, Bo and Myles, jockeyed for new roles in the family. But when I went back to work, and perhaps coincidentally perhaps not, snap. The good times were over and their relationship flipped, seemingly overnight.

This rattled me. I don’t have a sibling and I was resentful toward my sons - that they didn’t realize how lucky they were. I made this known to them and performed several other magnificent feats of faux-parenting, including yelling, calling out mistakes, ignoring the bad behavior, ordering them to “work it out” - and probably several embarrassing and obviously ineffective strategies.

I was particularly frustrated with our older son, who was more frequently the instigator of conflict. Why doesn’t he get it? How is he not learning from this?, I thought.

After a particularly bad episode, involving a modest but intention punch to a defenseless brother’s chest, I accidentally had a small breakthrough. I AAR’d my son.

An AAR is an After-action review that I learned about when reading some books about the US Army’s approach to leadership. Basically, a unit should debrief right after a mission using four simple questions. These questions vary depending on where you read about it but they’re roughly this:

• What did we intend?

• What actually happened?

• Why?

• What should we do differently next time?

It turns out, even at 4 years old, Bo was pretty responsive to the AAR. He was capable of thinking through these questions with some modest support and he actually learned something. But the takeaway of this story is deeper than to “AAR your kids.” The real lesson is that important “processes” like helping my sons learn from a mistake shouldn’t be improvised; for the important stuff I shouldn’t be winging it.

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Let’s simplify the world and say there are two kinds of organizational processes, explicit processes and implicit processes. I’m going to start with family stuff as an example, but as we’ll see shortly it applies to professional life as well.

Explicit processes are ones that are worked out, down to specific, simple steps. Explicit processes are the sorts of activities that everyone in our family has a mental checklist or process map for in their heads. In some instances, we even have simple diagrams drawn up on a whiteboard in our kitchen.

Here are some examples of explicit organizational processes in our family:

• The routine at dinner / bedtime

• The routine for how we get ready in the morning

• The routine for how we get ready when we have to leave the house

• The routine for drop-off and pick-up from school

• The routine for cleaning up toys

• The routine for feeding the dog

• The meal plan for the week

To be sure, we don’t have perfect processes worked out for all these routines - we’re always learning and improving. But having any process that are explicitly understood to the entire family does two things: 1) we avoid rookie mistakes (and at least some toddler meltdowns), and, 2) we have a starting point for process improvement. For explicit processes, we’re decidedly not winging it. We have a plan that is explicitly known to everyone.

Implicit processes are the situations that we haven’t thought through in advance or taken the time to make specific, simple, or known to everyone. The way these processes work is in the metaphorical black box - they happen, but it’s not clear how or why - we’re essentially winging it on these. Some examples in our family, past and present, are:

• How we coach our kids when they make mistakes

• How we share information with our kids and family

• How we learn and adjust as parents

• How we resolve sibling conflict (and when we intervene as parents and when we don’t)

• How we determine how much of a plate needs to be eaten before dessert is allowed.

Most of these are at least a little squishy in our household. But during the heart of Covid Robyn and I took something implicit - how we communicate a day-care Covid exposure and quarantine - and made it explicit. By working through the process and trying to make it simple, clear, and essentially into a checklist a few really good things happened:

• We were calmer (because we had a plan to lean on)

• We executed faster (because we knew our roles, and cut out unnecessary steps)

• We executed better (because we didn’t panic and forget really important, but easy to miss steps like getting complete information from our day care provider about the exposure)

Making the implicit process explicit is a game changer, because routines that are made simpler and clearer go much better than when we wing it. And as I mentioned previously, explicit processes are much easier to improve iteratively.

Of course, in our professional lives not every implicit process is consequential enough to make implicit (e.g., it’s probably okay to wing it when picking a spot for the quarterly happy hour). But in my experience lots of really consequential processes in organizations are ones where most of us are essentially winging it. Or worse, the processes are explicit but are complex, bloated, or shoddily communicated…and as a result outcomes are actually worse than winging it.

Here are some examples - how many of these are explicit processes in your organization? How many are implicit?

• How we learn from a failed project

• How we manage in a crisis

• How we hire, interview, fire, or promote fairly

• How we react to changing consumer or market trends

• How we coach and develop employees

• How we support new managers or employees

• How we make a big decision

• How we plan or facilitate meetings

• How we communicate major decisions or enterprise strategy

• How we set goals and measure KPIs 

• How we scope out, form the right team, and launch a strategic initiative

• How we make adjustments to the strategy or plan

How many of these should be simple, clear, and well understood? How many of these are okay to wing it? 

It seems to me that a simple, relatively cheap way to radically change the performance of an organization - whether at work or at home - is to take consequential processes that are implicit and make them simple, clear, and explicit.