Why It Is Important to Resist Process as a Proxy

Jeff Bezos’ latest letter to shareholders is quite short and worth reading (link here). The focus of the letter is how to avoid his organization to become complacent and go down. One particular point that captured my attention was about process as proxy to client relationship.

“A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us?”

And in the following of the letter Jeff Bezos makes also a few point about speed of decision which is for me also intrinsically linked to process or at least how quickly bureaucracy pervades organizations.

Process is not bad intrinsically but it can become bad if people satisfy themselves by following it (which is the essence of the bureaucratic organization). This is a neat reminder that we should keep in mind.