Process

Organizations are the webs of participation. Change the patterns of participation, and you change the organization.

Companies must remember — processes don’t do work, people do.

Look closely at the inner workings of any company and you’ll discover gaps between official work processes — the ‘ideal’ flows of tasks and procedures — and the real world practices behind how things actually get done. These gaps are not problems that need fixing; they’re opportunities that deserve leveraging. The real genius is found in the informal, impromptu, often inspired ways that real people solve real problems in ways that formal processes can’t anticipate.

When you’re competing on knowledge, the name of the game is improvisation, not standardization. By keeping processes elegantly minimal, companies leave room for their people to innovate and create.

The more you explore real work, the more you appreciate the power of a different kind of knowledge. with individuals, tacit knowledge means intuition, judgment, common sense — the capacity to do something without necessarily being able to explain it. With groups, tacit knowledge exists in the practices and relationships that emerge from working together over time — the fabric that connects communities of knowledge workers.

Recognizing the tacit and collective dimensions of work has big implications. It is built around informed participation. People need information to do their work, but it is only through working that they get the information the need.