Lives in Motion | Quebec City, Quebec, Canada | Sep 2008

Unrelated: Business process design starts off with a whiteboard, creative minds and colored stickies, gets processed into codes, rules, programs and processes; cleaned up, outlined and detailed, communicated and implemented, a blueprint for repeatable success.

But despite the plan, business processes get messy. Should that be a surprise? Businesses are created, managed and inhabited by people, and people are messy, despite our best intentions.

What happens? We face a web of interpersonal relationships and conflicts, differences of opinions and interpretations of information (truths, half-truths and myths), conflicting priorities and motives, differential access to information, the natural ups and downs and inconsistencies of human decision-making, and the ever-present, heavy hand of incentives.

Incentives form our decisions. Neglecting to pay attention to how our incentives are created by the rules and processes we craft is a guarantee for sub-optimal decision-making, for local maximization rather than global maximization.

Thoughts for today’s business environment…