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.

Share Post

More Posts

Ghost lights..

feeling the power of presence… and what it really means to ‘read the room.’

Singing on the subway

What I learned singing to strangers on the subway, and why emotional connections matters even more in a hi-tech era.

Bunny Bunny

A funny game illustrates what we may be missing in many of our meetings

More Updates

Emotional debt

Releasing the hidden costs of pent up frustrations

Aliveness

Finding the aliveness below the surface of stuck

Johnnie Moore

It’ll never work

Inspired by a post by Earl Mardle I’ve added a new category to this blog, It’ll Never Work. I’ll use it to flag stories about experiments carried out in the

Johnnie Moore

Stereotypes

Viv reviews Letters Left Unsent, the reflections of a humanitarian aid worker. It sounds fascinating, peeling back our surface stereotypes to reveal the rich, messy complexity of the real world.

Johnnie Moore

More fun at 173 Drury Lane

Adrian is continuing a stream of interesting posts at 173drurylane.com. I need to start writing some more stuff there too. I like the way our little experiment is going… I

Johnnie Moore

The organisation?

This image on the Delta7 blog made me laugh in recognition (as do many of the pictures there).