When the workflow lives in people’s heads instead of the business

Lots of people think processes are dull.

I don’t, when they are properly defined and written down.

The problems I see most often in small and growing organisations don’t come from lazy teams or lack of effort. They come from workflows living in people’s heads instead of in the business.

That’s when things start to feel messier and harder than they need to be.

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What it looks like when workflows live in people’s heads

When steps aren’t written down or clearly defined, people do their best to fill in the gaps.

That usually means:

• Everyone doing the same task slightly differently

• People checking or second guessing what happens next

• Work bouncing back because the next step wasn’t obvious

• Ownership being unclear

Over time, the same few people quietly become the fallback for everything. Not because they’re meant to, but because there is nowhere else for the work to land.

From the outside, the business can look busy and functioning. Inside, the day gets eaten up by clarifying, correcting and nudging things along.

Nothing is dramatically broken. It is just exhausting.

Why this isn’t a people problem

This is the bit that often gets misunderstood.

When workflows aren’t clear, good people don’t stop working. They adapt. They guess. They check. They compensate.

That extra effort can hide the real issue for a long time. Things keep moving, but they take more energy than they should.

So if work keeps coming back to the same people, or you only get to your own work late in the day, it’s rarely about capability or commitment.

It’s about visibility.

You can’t act on what you can’t see.

The cost of “that’s how we’ve always done it”

A lot of messy workflows aren’t new. They have evolved slowly over time.

• A step gets added.

• Something gets skipped.

• A workaround becomes normal.

Eventually, no one can quite explain why things are done the way they are. They just are.

Those are the wonky processes people stop questioning. They are usually the ones creating the most noise.

What changes when workflows are visible

When the real steps are written down and shared somewhere everyone can see:

• Guessing reduces

• Interruptions drop

• Ownership becomes clearer

• Work stops bouncing around

  
  

Not because anyone worked harder, but because things finally make sense.

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Processes don’t need to be heavy or complicated.

They just need to exist somewhere outside people’s heads.

Sometimes that starts with nothing more than a big sheet of paper, a few sticky notes and an honest look at how work actually gets done.

Real or digital.