To question what is real and what is not, Plato tells a story about a cave. In the middle of a cave, a number of prisoners sit against a small wall, chained since childhood. Behind them there is a huge campfire, which they cannot see. In between the campfire and the prisoners, people walk in and out. All the prisoners can see is the shadows of these people on the cave’s wall in front of them. And because of the echo, even the sounds the people make seem to come from the direction of the shadows. The prisoners would know no better than these shadows to be the real world.
Now let’s assume, Plato continues, that one prisoner is released from his chains, gets up and walks around. First he will not recognize anything in this new reality, but after time he would adapt. He would understand more about the new world, and perhaps even understand how people walking alongside a campfire cast shadows on the wall. What would happen if he would return to the other prisoners and tell them about what he has learned. They would ignore him, ridicule him, and if it weren’t for their chains, they would probably kill him.
A story from the ancient past? Certainly, but it still holds true. In fact, this is something to remember every time we sit behind the computer and look at a graph in our business intelligence tools, and study a Visio-style diagram that defines a process. They are not real, they are nothing but reflections. While we stare at the computer, reality is what is happening behind us.
Don’t be like the prisoner, mistaking graphs and diagrams for reality. Reality, or the most approximate thing to it, is in conversations between you and your customers. The more you try to model them, style them, and simplify them, the more abstract they become, the more of a shadow of reality they are. Instead, business managers and business analysts should focus on following the conversation with the customers and other stakeholders, and conduct business based on this reality. A business process then becomes not a predefined set of steps, but nothing more than a set of activities that allows you to talk, share and interact. Freely. Really.
Pingback: BPM Quotes of the week « Adam Deane
Frank:
I my be wrong, but this outburst using the above analogy reminds me when blended with a process team, time people waste trying to document processes, endless discussions, loss of time and money, afraid of changing things, lost in the knowledge repository. Sometimes it’s difficult to open people’s skull and put some light insight it.
Good post.
Regards
This is so true and also irritating me (I still can sleep
. Why do people believe when they draw a process model they will be able to manage a process, but are not surprised that when they draw a ferrari it will not show up on their parking spot.
Hi Procesje,
Good point, although actually I tried to make a different one. It is not needed to separate “drawing” processes and processing them. In fact, it is entirely possible to do both at the same time: drawing them is creating them. This is the whole point of systems that are meta-model driven, and has been the leading paradigm in the field of BI for years.
My point is that taking the process as the lens to the world is dangerous. Processes tend to want to be in control, instead of being controlled. That creates a very limited view on what is happening, only the things that fit the process lens. By “liberating yourself from the evil of the process”, the purpose of this web site, reality becomes a much brighter picture.
frank
Frank,
I am from Holland, so maybe I didn’t understand the English very well
I agree with you that you must not make processes the holy grail. Is that because of the disadvantages of processmanagement or because of the way moste people look (lens?) at process management? I think it is the last in a lot of cases.
Most of the time I see that people define a process as what I would call the workflow (the steps in their sequence). This is also how processes are visualised on the wall of the cave. Then indeed you miss reality and that means that processes need information, systems, people, steering, rules etc.
Processes are just one way of managing an organisation. In my opinion a good way, but you have to be aware that a process is a collaboration of all aspects mentioned above. So it’s holistic again and not such a narrow lens I think.
Procesje