Process Entropy and Process Evolution
I've felt on the verge of a breakthrough several times over the course of my 15 years of self-employment and entrepreneurship. Not a breakthrough in terms of an innovative new product or groundbreaking discovery, an operational breakthrough.
My almost-breakthroughs go something like this: I'm working on a 3 to 5 year plan, wrangling process and strategy into a self-perpetuating system. I'm engineering a stable business model and building predictable workflows. I‘m imagining myself cresting the top of rollercoaster, waiting for the car to be let loose to ride the track powered only by its own momentum.
And then, something breaks. Or maybe it doesn't break, but there is an unexpected result. A system slows down. A process starts to seem inadequate. The market shifts gears. A new idea emerges. An opportunity presents itself. Distractions arise.
In that situation, I think it's hard to stay objective. The imagined future state of "I've made it, and I can relax now" gets ripped away. Even if things are still good, even if the change is good, it can feel like failure. And when things feel like failure, it's easy to make things worse instead of better.
In today's This is Not Advice, I want to respond to a question that came from down the hall. That is, I want to share a situation that I recently coached my own dear husband, , through.
We started our podcast production agency, YellowHouse.Media in August 2019.
By the end of that year, we had enough clients to keep Sean busy. When the pandemic hit, I thought for sure we'd lose clients. Instead, they just kept coming. We hired additional team members, borrowed some labor from my company, and made our operations more efficient. We continued to grow in 2021 and 2022. But 2023 was a tough year. We saw more client attrition than we had in the first three years combined.
We're stable, and we're even growing again. But it was a classic case of feeling like we'd just about "made it" and then having that potential ripped away. Or as my old boss used to say, “We snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.” Sean and I have both been a bit tender about it for the last few months.
Even being immersed in that context…
I was a bit surprised when Sean told me he felt like his procedures were a mess.
Sean is an anarchist—which might lead you to think he's happy to fly by the seat of his pants. But that would be a fundamental misunderstanding of anarchism (and Sean). Instead, he (and anarchism) tends to be very process-oriented. And I knew for a fact how much care and effort he's put into figuring out how to work with our clients. His procedures are, objectively, not a mess.1
So I reminded him of this. But I wanted to get past reassurance and investigate the cause of his distress. It boiled down to this: he has an "ideal" version of his procedures, and then he has the version of those procedures that's either implicitly or explicitly been customized for each client.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it can be a lot to keep track of.
What's more, our client relationships have a long learning curve. Podcast production has a lot of moving parts—managing those moving parts has always been part of our value proposition. We do our best to keep our clients from worrying about those moving parts, but the more aware they are of what’s happening, the better we can work together and the more creative they can be.
That leaves us with a choice to make.
We can either try to teach them the whole process at once, or we can start with a minimum viable process and teach them how we work (as well as learn how they work) over time. The former option is overwhelming. We feel like we’re doing our due diligence, but we just end up confusing our podcast hosts. The latter option means we have to deal with a bit of frustration on our end, but our podcast hosts end up getting to consistent production more quickly.
So, all that said, Sean was feeling some friction. His procedures weren't a mess, but he felt like things weren't going as smoothly as they should be. That should—that mismatch between expectation and reality—is key. His unconscious expectation has been that he'll reach a point when he's solved all the problems, ironed out all the wrinkles, and documented his way to a business that runs itself.
But no process or system actually works that way. Businesses and procedures can only be stable for so long. Everything in this world tends toward disorder. That's the second law of thermodynamics, after all—entropy. Okay, I'll admit to having no more than a pop culture-level understanding of what entropy is.
“Mutual learning happens in the entropy; we need the confusion to release the new. This dance exists everywhere in nature. It is the swarm of confusion that becomes the grace of the way things come together.”
Another way to think of this is what systems theorist Donella Meadows calls “drift to low performance.” A system drifts to low performance when we think things are worse than they are. “As actual performance varies,” explains Meadows, “the best results are dismissed as aberrations, the worst results stay in the memory.” Our perceptions, of course, influence the actions we take and the goals we set. Even our attempts at correction can create new problems and hasten the drift to greater disorder.
The discrepancy between an ideal state for a process or procedure and the actual state of a process or procedure is natural. Under the right circumstances, maintenance and care get everything back on track. The drift to low performance occurs when the discrepancy is between the actual state of a process or procedure and the perceived state of a process or procedure. A discrepancy between reality and the doom and gloom we fear is reality. Between facts and dystopian fiction.
Entropy isn’t a bad thing.
It’s just part of life. But it can certainly be demoralizing.
So perhaps a better metaphor for describing what inevitably happens to procedures as we use them is evolution. What can seem like a breakdown is often just a natural result of an idealized procedure coming into contact with real-world conditions that prompt an adaptation.
Lots of people think that "survival of the fittest" means that the best or strongest or smartest survive.
But that's not the case. It's not "fit" as in "fitness," it's "fit" as in "match." The version of an organism that best fits its environment will be the one that goes on to reproduce and pass on its unique characteristics to another generation. Evolution is a process that only happens in relation to the environment and its inhabitants.
Evolution doesn't just happen; it happens because some organisms can survive in a given environment while others can't. That's why a polar bear can thrive and reproduce in an arctic habitat while it would languish in the savannah. Conversely, a lion thrives and reproduces on the savannah, while it would languish in the arctic. Both are strong and efficient animals. But they fit different environments.
The same thing happens with a procedure—especially one that is used by a provider and a client. A procedure tends to evolve to fit the needs of the provider, the client, and the environment the client fits into. If it doesn't, the procedure gets abandoned.
Unfortunately, evolution and abandonment can seem like two sides of the same coin.
“The assumption is that evolution is a line. But evolution is in the context, in what we learn together, mutually.”
What's the difference between letting a procedure evolve—even into something that doesn't look much like what you started with—and abandoning a procedure? Learning. When you abandon a procedure, truly let it go, all you have left is reacting—stimulus, reaction, stimulus, reaction. But when a procedure evolves, things might get messy, but they're messy because you're learning. And as you learn, you adapt. You recognize when a change creates a new opportunity. You notice how adjusting a step or deadline makes things work better for a client.
Evolution isn't a grand plan. (That’s intelligent design.) Instead, it's messy and awkward. It's weird and wonderful. Just imagine what it was like for that first white bear in a family full of brown bears!
Of course, procedures in a business or team aren't purely evolutionary.
We actually can assert a grand plan. What Sean realized was that he'd let some combination of entropy and evolution loose in the environment, and, having learned from the results, it was time to reassert a grand plan.
The grand plan isn’t a newer, better, more evolved ideal system, though. The grand plan is the rules by which the system can self-organize. That is, the grand plan guides evolution rather than offers the ideal the system evolves into.
“The ability to self-organize is the strongest form of system resilience. A system that can evolve can survive almost any change, by changing itself.”
In this case, Sean had procedures to work from. He didn't need to reinvent any wheels or helical DNA structures. And he didn’t need to change the goal of his systems. Instead, he had to adapt the rules a bit so that his procedures could evolve in a way that benefitted the whole system.
He made a foundational procedure document and then started to adjust it, client by client. The foundational procedure kept both the client’s needs and the team's needs in focus so that as changes occurred, those changes couldn’t overburden either the client or the team. Instead of feeling like he failed Standard Operating Procedures 101, he realized he was in a great spot and simply needed to take the next step.
Holding tightly to what should be or what was supposed to happen or what used to be the case makes it nearly impossible to adapt to a new environment. The thing to remember is that we’re always operating in a new environment. A business grows, and we adapt. A business shrinks, and we adapt. The market, the technology, the team, the goal, the resources can all change, and we adapt.
We can reduce friction and increase efficiency, but we’ll always make adjustments. There is no glorious day when things just work and don’t ever need to change.
Change itself is pretty glorious.
Footnote
Unless we use the word "mess" the way Russell Ackoff does. Then, sure.
Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes. Problems are abstractions extracted from messes by analysis; they are to messes as atoms are to tables and charts … Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes.
