Clay Shirky on process

Johnnie Moore

Johnnie Moore

I’m Johnnie Moore, and I help people work better together

I enjoyed this from Clay Shirky: Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity. Clay’s not saying we shouldn’t have processes but he’s a minimalist, as am I.

Regret is one of our most powerful emotions, and it is magnified in groups. When organizations overshoot, they tend to overshoot in the direction of minimizing regret rather than maximizing capability…

Process is the feature creep of organizations. In the same way software has to have features, groups have to have process. But like software, process creep in groups is insidious — each additional check in or form seems to cost little and add much, but over time, the cumulative overhead of process can hamstring an organization, almost without their noticing.

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