There seem to be some devastating prejudices among managers and entrepreneurs regarding the need or usefulness of documenting their processes and procedures (the what and how of what to do), as well as systematically recording what is actually done. I would like to refer to two of these prejudices, which in my opinion have combined to deteriorate the image of these instruments in the eyes of managers and which stem from an incomplete understanding of their true importance, function and use.
The first prejudice, at one end of the spectrum of opinions, condemns these documents to the unfavorable place of enemies of efficiency, stagnant bureaucratic redoubts that resist being displaced by technology, or frank annoyances that force the postponement of much more productive tasks. when there is no other choice but to make them. This vision considers the documented procedures as an evil that is necessary -for example- when you want to certify a management system but that is forgotten once the objective is achieved, until someone asks if they are applied. It is something that auditors demand and that consultants usually elaborate, sometimes with scarce and faulty informational inputs,provided by officials more inclined to keep the secrets of their activity to themselves - just in case - than to put their knowledge in black on white so that someone else can use it.
In this hypothesis, the operational documents constitute dead sheets that will accumulate dust in some desk drawer until the next system revision, in which everyone will run from one side to the other for two or three frantic weeks, to update instructions that were little applied and forms registration that were rarely properly completed. This boils down to many "quality management systems" that have been implemented by marketing requirements rather than inspired by a genuine desire for improvement. And the sad thing is that, most of the time, those two or three weeks of work are enough to maintain the privilege, despite some grumbling from the auditors.
And there is another prejudice, at the opposite end of the spectrum. Many entrepreneurs, whose operational problems have overcome them, often hire a consultant to help them write "what needs to be done" and thereby try to get everyone to carry out their tasks as expected. This conceptual transposition perceives people as programmable machines and leads to more conflicts, errors, resistance, desertion and failures, of which the poor consultant - who failed to explain to the businessman that this would not work - usually pays the high professional price of error for employed. For the entrepreneur, it will still be a good idea that was poorly executed.
It is as dangerous to believe that documents are only bureaucracy, as to attribute to them the magical power to change a reality that has its own rules. Human behavior is complex, so much so that the scientists who have dedicated their lives to studying it are discovering, thanks to the sophisticated instruments available today, that very little they really know about how our brain equipment works. However, some very basic data could contribute to solving many of our current practical difficulties, if we stopped thinking that such data is useless in the real world. Therefore, we are going to review some of them and their meaning, in the context of the things we do in organizations, to assess which ones are wrong and what changes would be appropriate to introduce to improve them.
Avoiding organizational schizophrenia
The successful execution of a procedure involves neurological resources and processes of various kinds, which must be understood at least in a basic way, if we are to achieve any acceptable result. The deployment of these resources in the correct sequence allows fluency to be anticipated throughout the implementation, to ensure a conclusion according to plan.
The human brain has five functionally differentiated regions, although all of them act together to perform important tasks that require it. The frontal lobe deals with planning and decision making; To do so, it receives the specialized informative contribution of the other four brain areas: an analysis of contextual sensations (sensory cortex), the emotional interpretation of the experiences involved (limbic system), an inventory of fine motor skills available for immediate use (cerebellum) and an evaluation of the survival value of what is intended to be done (trunk or brain stem). Such the most elementary screenshot we could imagine.
Once the course to follow has been decided, each of the five regions will be able to dedicate themselves to their own functional specialty, in intimate and continuous interaction with the other areas of the brain. Intermittently, they will execute, consult, evaluate and correct according to the feedback they get as they do things, because each one knows perfectly their mission in the team and their contribution to the final result. It is the same process that any system should follow, because the rules at this level are identical. And every organization is a system.
The great - huge - difference between individual beings and teams is that each of us has built in his mind, throughout our lives and unconsciously, a "model" of reality that we use as a "map" of reference to think, to act and to relate to the environment. Even though experience continually updates that mental map - which, therefore, is never equal to itself at any two moments in life - we feel that we have a personality and a scheme of values, principles and criteria that guide us., based on which we do what we do.
Instead, a team must build that map or model of reality in an "artificial" way and must do so without forgetting any of its members, because each one must have the opportunity to make their contribution to the common model in order for it to be viable., so that it has validity and legitimacy. And this should be done from a systemic perspective, which contemplates the whole and the interactions between its components, by diagramming a “neural network” that will serve to identify the specific mission of each subgroup and each individual in the context of global goals.. Anything else we do will produce a dangerous mismatch with reality, leading to what is often called a "schizophrenic organization."
Only here is it pertinent and opportune to dedicate ourselves to specifying the sequence of tasks and their respective managers at the operational levels, to designing the way to carry them out with probable success and to anticipating the controls that will be convenient to carry out to ensure it. In each of these instances, it will be necessary to respect ergonomic principles that allow people to anticipate, with high probability, a fluid performance.
And finally, it was time to document.
The memory of the organization, sustenance of the memory of the team
The documents that represent the organization's processes and procedures constitute its procedural memory, its account of how things are done, its know-how. They are the theoretical materialization of their values and their culture, whether they are made explicit or not, and therefore must be consistent with them. It is the only way we have found so far to emulate the mnemonic function of the human brain when we transfer the schema to the team level, which needs to "know and remember collectively." In this way, communication between all its members will be easy and fluid, because all of them will be able to speak the same operating language. It is the way in which the organization can learn and the point from which it is possible to speak, in a legitimate way, of “knowledge management”.
The activity records, meanwhile, are the organization's episodic memory, a biographical archive that allows us to continue learning from our mistakes and our successes. What we actually do and what we achieve based on that, helps us to review our past actions and to plan timely changes to improve them. Therefore, records are even more important than procedures, since they reflect reality, daily practice, saving the ever-latent danger of writing what we want to do and not what we really do. It is the humility bath of some procedures that sin of voluntarism.
Is this enough? No way. Because we have yet to transform that organizational procedural memory - which is just a "work plan", a simple study material - into the human procedural memory that allows people to execute the organizational mission. It is here that the data to which I referred at the beginning intervene and that show us how we can ensure that each one does what is expected. The brain has its own rules of operation and to achieve that purpose, it is essential to respect them.
The frontal lobe, the instrument of our most advanced mental abilities, is also the evolutionarily youngest and most immature region of the human brain. There are those who insist on making people function from this resource to carry out complex activities, without taking into account that the working memory that manages this cortical area suffers from a serious limitation in its ability to manage information, coupled with even more characteristics Critics such as its high volatility, high energy consumption and short-term temporary storage capacity. In many circumstances, “paying more attention” only produces more errors, while we could assure its almost total absence if we automated everything that can be reasonably automated. And this is what the cerebellum, the main seat of human procedural memory,It has learned to do over three hundred million years of evolution on the planet. Because we need to do most things always the same, without “thinking about it”. As we do in daily life.
The more ergonomic the procedure design, the shorter the learning curve. The faster we automate behavior, through the systematic repetition of carefully described activities, the sooner we can free our conscious attention to perform the tasks that truly require it. And the better we understand the interaction between the different processes, the more fluid internal communication will become. It is what we call maximum effectiveness and optimal efficiency.
And all because we learned how to properly document what we do.
