Even Better If: the question that gets people to tell you the truth

The technical parts of process work are the easy parts. The hard part is that you’re walking into a room and asking capable, busy, professionally proud people to describe the ways in which their working lives aren’t as good as they could be.

If you get that wrong, everything downstream is wrong too, because you’ll be designing from a picture people gave you to protect themselves.

Three sentences that changed my hit rate

I stopped asking what is broken. I stopped asking what the problems are. I ask what works well, and then I ask what would be Even Better If.

It sounds like a small thing and it isn’t. What is broken invites a defense. What would be even better if invites a contribution. The first framing makes somebody the subject of an investigation. The second makes them a colleague on the same side of the table as you. Same information, completely different quality of answer.

And starting with what works well isn’t softening-up. It’s a genuine question with a genuine purpose, because some of what’s in that process is hard-won wisdom that you’ll destroy if you don’t know it’s there. I’ve seen transformation projects tear out a step that looked redundant and discover six months later that it was the only thing catching a particular failure.

Why people do not volunteer the truth

In my experience there are three reasons the waste in an organization doesn’t get reported, and only one of them is about time.

People are too busy. The work consumes exactly the capacity that would be needed to step back and examine it. It’s self-reinforcing: the more of it there is, the less chance anyone has to do anything about it.

People are ashamed. This is the one nobody says out loud, and I’ve seen it most in senior roles. There’s an unspoken feeling of I should have sorted this out already, or if I raise this it reflects on me. The shame keeps people quiet and the silence keeps the drag in place.

People feel guilty about delegating. A surprising amount of low-value work exists because somebody senior didn’t quite trust a system and added a manual check to be safe. Each of those was a reasonable decision at the time. Collectively they built something that drowns people.

De-risking the shame

Since shame is a real barrier, you have to actively remove it, and you have to mean it.

I start by naming the dynamic. Every process accumulates waste over time. That’s a law of organizational physics, not a failure of the people in it. Growth without a methodology produces exactly this outcome, every time, everywhere.

Then I normalize it: every organization I’ve worked with has this problem. Yours isn’t worse than average. The difference is that nobody has had both the mandate and the method to look at it properly.

I say that because it’s true. In thirty years I’ve never walked into an operation that didn’t have significant undesigned work in it, including my own company. Once people believe you’re not there to find out whose fault it is, what they tell you changes completely.

The person who says it cannot be improved

You’ll meet them: the person who states with total confidence that their process couldn’t be better is quite often sitting on the largest single source of drag in the operation.

Not through obstruction. Through adaptation. They’ve been doing it this way for years, they’ve absorbed every workaround so completely that it no longer registers as a workaround, and from inside it genuinely does look fine.

You won’t argue them out of that, and you shouldn’t try. What works is letting somebody else’s view into the room. A finance colleague who mentions they spend two days a month reconciling because the data arrives in three formats. A scientist who says they stopped using the inventory system because it was never accurate, so they just order what they need.

Raving fans, resisters, and the long middle

You’ll get the full range. There are people who’ll be thrilled you’ve arrived and slightly too hopeful, who believe you have a magic wand and will be disappointed when it turns out to be a methodology. And there are people who don’t want any of this.

I’d encourage you not to write off the resisters, because a decent proportion of them have entirely rational reasons. They’ve seen initiatives before. They’ve watched a consultant arrive, produce a deck and leave. They may have been the person who has to pick up the pieces when the last redesign didn’t work. Sometimes the resister is the only one in the room who knows why the awkward step exists.

Be curious about why someone is playing the role they’re playing. Build trust. Build the solution with them rather than presenting it to them. And when the outcomes arrive, attribute them to the team rather than to whoever ran the method.

Start with the willing

A practical rule for the implementation end of this, which follows directly from the same thinking.

You’ll always have early adopters and resisters. Spend your early energy on the willing, deliver something real, and let the evidence do the work. Don’t burn your first three months trying to convince the most skeptical person in the building, convince the open-minded ones, deliver a result they can see, and momentum does the rest.

Nothing builds confidence in a new way of working like evidence that it works. Define the measures in advance, take them from day one, and share them visibly. People who wouldn’t accept an argument will accept a number about their own working week.

Why this is not a soft skill

I want to finish on this, because the human parts of this work get filed under soft and treated as the bit you do if there’s time.

The quality of your analysis is capped by the honesty of your inputs. You can run flawless process mapping on a picture that people gave you defensively and you’ll produce a confident, well-structured, expensive answer to the wrong question.