The Procedure Paradigm
Whenever I’ve gone to a new company, there’s always a learning curve to just get the hang of the basics. I asked if there were procedures for such a task. Nothing but perplexed looks. The more I asked, the more I realized that everyone had their own way of doing things. Their methods were all based on tribal knowledge and the reasons were lost in the past. In this post, we'll explore the importance of formally documenting important processes.
Remember the last time you bought a piece of furniture or a kid’s toy that had ‘some assembly required’ printed on the box? As we all know too well, after the box opens, that ‘some assembly’ is a blatant lie! I always rummage through the boxes to get the instructions and start identifying parts (a procedure of sorts) due to my numerous mistakes with assembly. The instructions that come with products that we buy are procedures. We usually don’t think of them that way but they provide us guidance for operating or assembling a widget and that’s what we use procedures for in the workplace. From these similarities, we can translate our personal experiences and lessons-learned at home into the procedures that we use in the workplace. These experiences, and errors, from home are very relatable to the first time use of a good procedure in the workplace.
Procedures can be extremely powerful tools. They can help us safely operate almost anything on the planet; from airplanes to nuclear reactors to locking doors at the close of business. Do we really need to use the same step-by-step, circle-slash, peer-checked, independent verification procedure for each of those tasks?
