The First Button

This morning I did up the first button wrong (first day back from holiday 🤷🏻‍♂️) and the rest of the shirt just dutifully followed.

It struck me immediately: we see the exact same thing in company processes. Nothing new, of course, but a nice reminder all the same; get the first step wrong, and no matter how neatly you stitch it into a process map and robust IT infrastructure, it won’t fix itself. It just scales.

We remind ourselves of this daily and ignore it in the same breath: Digitalisation won’t save bad processes. It only makes them faster, more expensive, and harder to untangle.

When did anyone last ask, before automating something: is that first button even done up right?

Often it isn’t. Often you only notice at the seventh button.