Gobbling down chow at the Chinese restaurant with one of my sons, and guess what? I get a fortune cookie that says, “Within a year, you will inherit a lot of money!” Oh, really? Let’s look at this fortune cookie in two different ways:
- Positive: “Oh, how cool! I’m going to get a ton of money! What a great fortune!”
- Negative: “Oh, no! Who’s going to die in the next 12 months? What a horrible fortune!”
So, which is it? Is this fortune cookie an IOU or a death threat? It depends on your Process POV: Process Point-of-View
You’d better bring the same holistic perspective to your own business processes. Each new process “improvement” is probably someone’s process “death threat.” Stakeholder analysis is critical if you care about Process POV. Just because you like your fancy new process – “We cut out two layers of bureaucracy!” – doesn’t mean that everyone will. Just remember: Sometimes you’re the bureaucracy-killer, other times, you’re the bureaucrat about to be killed.
Think about all the stakeholders in these scenarios:
- Heart patients waiting for a suitable donor (Who sees a miracle and who sees a tragedy?)
- Streamlining crowded prison populations through early release programs (“Hey! It’s not so crowded with those punks out of here!” That’s one POV…just one.)
- Educational systems that raise school-wide scores by “teaching the test.” (“Congratulations on your successful school!” What about the other POVs?)
It goes on and on. If you have a process, you have stakeholders. If you have more than one stakeholder, you have different potential process POVs. Know yours, know those of your stakeholders. Don’t mislead yourself into thinking you can align them. Sometimes, you can. Most times, it’s a fool’s errand. Expose process POVs early and often. Drive your change in the light of full disclosure. Acknowledge process POVs, do what you can, and then move on with an implementation that does the least harm to the most people (or the most good for the most people, if you watched a lot of Star Trek as a kid.)
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