𝐂𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐭, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐢𝐭, 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐥𝐞𝐝𝐠𝐞,

𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 p𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦 𝐨𝐟 𝐁𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐑𝐞𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐬

(from my "Show Your Work: The Payoffs and How-To's of Working Out Loud", Wiley/ATD)

Many organizations are good at capturing the basics of explicit information: to order product 𝘡, fill out form 𝘕; submit requests by Thursday. But much of our time is spent dealing with Barely Repeatable Processes: the ones that involve people, and which are often managed through a morass of emails, lunches out, post-it notes, and meetings. It is, in other words, how most of us spend most of our days. They are fluid (non-rigid) processes and events with many moving parts that are not easily mapped, as with a manufacturing process.

The truth is, asking someone to ‘write down everything they know’ or ‘list everything they do’ just doesn’t work very well. We can find out what they do, but not 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘥𝘰𝘯𝘦. And overengineered, bureaucratized reports and documentation processes are often exercises in futility as they capture the “what” of work but not the “how”.

The image below shows an example of a newly-implemented process for submitting status reports. It was provided by an HR outsourcing firm's middle manager who asked to remain anonymous. The IT department developed it to force employees to use SharePoint instead of the less formal tools they had been using. When I asked for details, as the image is not very legible, the person who submitted it said: “You don’t want to be able to read it. You’ll go blind.”