The Slow Erosion of Doing: When Process Devours Progress

Posted on by

The Slow Erosion of Doing: When Process Devours Progress

My fingers were still tingling from that familiar jolt of frustration. Not from spilled coffee or a stiff neck, but from the sudden, jarring white screen where twenty-three browser tabs had just been. Vanished. All of them. Just like that, hours of research, half-written thoughts, and critical documentation evaporated into the digital ether. It’s a small, personal catastrophe, yet it carries the distinct echo of a much larger, insidious problem I see everywhere: the erosion of actual work by the sheer weight of its surrounding process.

This isn’t just about lost tabs; it’s about lost momentum.

The digital void reminded me of the physical one, that gap between intent and execution. Take the client who needed a simple landing page update. Ten minutes, maybe, for the actual code change. But to get there? Submit a ticket to a Jira board, which then waits for review in a weekly prioritization meeting, where it’s assigned to a project manager, only to be placed in a designer’s two-month backlog. The whole process, designed to bring order, instead introduces a glacial delay for something that could have been resolved before the end of a single coffee break. It’s a performance art piece in deferment.

It’s this kind of systemic absurdity that makes you question everything. For years, I’ve simply bought my own keyboard when mine inevitably gives out, never bothering to expense it. Why? Because the official process involves three forms and requires two levels of approval. The cost of my personal productivity lost navigating that bureaucratic labyrinth would far exceed the $73 (or $103, or $33, depending on the model) of the keyboard itself. It’s a tiny example, but it illustrates a fundamental truth: we optimize everything around the work, but rarely the actual work itself.

Process Scar Tissue

Process, at its genesis, is almost always well-intentioned. It’s born from a singular problem, a one-off mistake that must never, ever happen again. Someone forgot a step, a safety issue arose, a quality control measure was missed. And so, a new rule is born, a new checkpoint implemented, a new form mandated. This is how organizations accumulate what I call ‘process scar tissue.’ Each layer of bureaucracy, initially a protective measure, eventually becomes a constraint, thickening until the organization spends more energy navigating its own rules than it does serving its customers or achieving its mission.

Consider Logan R.J., a safety compliance auditor. His world is process, meticulously documented and rigorously enforced. His latest project involved a manual spanning 233 pages, a testament to the layers of protection and protocol built up over decades. “We have a protocol,” he once told me, his voice a dry, weary rasp, “for reporting a loose floor tile that requires three separate forms, each signed by a different department head. The actual fix? A dab of adhesive and about three minutes of work. But if you don’t follow the process, you could incur a fine of $373, or worse, someone could slip and sue.” Logan, despite his role, understood the irony. He knew the purpose, but he also saw the cost. And yet, I recall a time he was tasked with streamlining a different safety checklist, reducing it from 13 steps to 3, only to add an additional ‘pre-check validation’ step which, in essence, brought the complexity back to square one through a different door. It’s a hard habit to break, this need for control.

Effortless Experience

Think about the last truly simple transaction you made. Maybe it was buying a coffee, or perhaps picking out something as fundamental as a good night’s sleep from a reputable vendor. The best experiences are often those where the process is so invisible, so effortless, that you don’t even perceive it as a process. It just is. That’s the ideal we aspire to, yet rarely achieve in our professional lives. When you’re looking for something reliable, something that promises peace and directness, you might gravitate towards something like a Luxe Mattress – where the value is clear, the choice is direct, and the purchasing experience isn’t burdened by layers of unnecessary bureaucracy.

This isn’t to say all process is bad. Some rules are absolutely critical; they protect lives, ensure quality, and maintain order. The trick, and it’s a fiendishly difficult one, is discerning between the essential bone structure and the ossified scar tissue. Often, processes are created by people who are far removed from the actual execution, leading to elegant, theoretical solutions that crumble under the weight of real-world variables. Or, they’re designed defensively, not proactively, aiming to prevent every conceivable negative outcome, no matter how remote, creating an impenetrable wall around basic functionality.

The Creative Cage

I made a similar mistake once. I was convinced that a new project management tool, with its thirteen different reporting metrics and three-tiered approval structure, would finally bring clarity to our creative team. What it brought instead was an additional two hours of administrative work per person, per week, and a mountain of data no one ever actually read. We had optimized the reporting of the work, but made the doing of the work far harder. It was a beautiful, intricate cage, designed to protect us from chaos, but it ended up stifling creativity and increasing frustration. It was a valuable, if embarrassing, lesson in mistaking activity for progress.

This is how organizations slowly lose the ability to act. The system becomes so rigid and self-protective that it strangles the very innovation and common sense it was designed to enable. Decisions that should take minutes stretch into weeks. Opportunities are missed because the internal machinery moves too slowly to grasp them. The focus shifts inward, towards internal compliance and navigating the maze, rather than outward, towards the customer or the core mission. The original problem – a forgotten step, a missed detail – is long gone, but the solution it spawned lives forever, a monument to an outdated fear.

What happens then is a subtle, almost imperceptible shift in culture. People find workarounds. They go rogue, like my keyboard purchase, because the official path is simply too arduous. These shadow processes, while efficient, erode trust and transparency. Or, worse, people simply give up, becoming disengaged cogs in a machine they no longer understand or believe in. The vibrancy drains away, replaced by a quiet resignation that the system is unchangeable. This isn’t just about inefficiency; it’s about a deeper, more profound loss of purpose and agency. It’s about remembering why we started doing the work in the first place, and asking if our current methods are still serving that initial spark, or if they’ve become the very thing holding us back.

business