Process is organizational scar tissue. It forms at points of previous failure. Organizations claim it ensures quality and consistency. It actually exists to make individual judgment irrelevant and distribute accountability to the point of elimination.
Every organization claims to hate process. Teams complain about bureaucracy. Executives announce initiatives to “cut red tape” and “move fast.” Startups advertise their lack of process as competitive advantage.
Then the same organizations create more process. They add approval layers. They introduce templates. They mandate workflows. They build tools that enforce sequence and require documentation.
The stated reasons are quality, consistency, risk management, compliance. These are explanations for external consumption. They describe what organizations claim process does, not why it exists.
Process exists because organizations scale past the point where individual judgment works. It exists because coordinating independent decisions becomes impossible without constraint. It exists because someone made a consequential error and the organization responded by making that error structurally impossible to repeat.
Mostly, process exists to ensure that when things go wrong, no individual can be held responsible.
Process as Blame Distribution System
An engineer deploys code that breaks production. The organization responds by adding deployment process. Now deployments require review, testing, approval, staging validation, and sign-off.
The stated purpose is preventing bad deploys. The actual function is distributing accountability. When the next deploy breaks production, no single person is responsible. The code was reviewed. The tests passed. The staging validation succeeded. The sign-off was obtained. The process was followed.
The process creates a diffusion of responsibility. Everyone involved contributed to the decision. No one made the decision. The failure becomes a process failure, not a judgment failure. Process failures are fixed by adding more process.
This is structurally appealing to organizations. Individual accountability creates legal exposure, political risk, and morale problems. Firing someone for a mistake creates resentment, reduces psychological safety, and signals that errors are career-ending. Not firing someone signals that errors have no consequences.
Process solves this by eliminating individual decision authority. You cannot be blamed for a decision you were not empowered to make alone. The process made the decision. You executed the process. If the outcome was wrong, the process needs adjustment.
Organizations describe this as “quality control” or “checks and balances.” The actual mechanism is liability dispersion.
Why Process Accumulates at Failure Points
Process does not emerge from rational design. It accumulates at locations where past failures occurred and someone with authority demanded that the specific failure never repeat.
The intern deletes the production database. The organization adds a process requiring approval for database operations. The approval process does not prevent all database errors. It prevents interns from making unsupervised database changes.
The vendor delivers late and over budget. The organization creates a procurement process requiring three bids, legal review, and executive sign-off. The process does not prevent late or over-budget vendors. It prevents anyone from selecting a vendor without documented justification.
The marketing campaign generates PR backlash. The organization institutes approval requirements for external communications. The process does not prevent bad PR. It ensures leadership reviews messaging before publication.
Each process addresses the last failure. None address the category of failures. The result is a collection of disconnected rules that make specific errors harder to repeat while creating new error modes the process does not contemplate.
Organizations end up with process that prevents problems from 2018 while failing to address problems from 2024. The process persists because removing it requires someone to take responsibility for the risk of re-enabling the 2018 failure mode.
The safe choice is preservation. The organization carries process indefinitely, accreting new layers as new failures occur. The weight increases until process overhead becomes the dominant organizational cost.
The Gap Between Stated Purpose and Actual Function
Organizations describe process using efficiency language. “Standardized workflows improve consistency.” “Quality gates ensure reliability.” “Approval chains manage risk.”
The actual function is coordination at scale and decision authority removal.
Code review exists ostensibly to catch bugs and improve code quality. Studies show minimal correlation between review thoroughness and defect rates. The primary function of code review is knowledge distribution and reducing single-person dependency. The secondary function is creating an audit trail showing that deployment was not a unilateral decision.
Performance reviews exist ostensibly to improve employee performance and guide development. The correlation between performance review scores and actual performance is weak. The primary function is creating documentation to defend termination decisions and justify compensation changes. The secondary function is forcing managers to have conversations they would otherwise avoid.
Architecture review boards exist ostensibly to ensure technical coherence. The primary function is giving senior engineers veto power over decisions made by teams outside their authority. The secondary function is slowing down decisions until political alignment is achieved.
The stated purposes are defensible. The actual functions are harder to articulate in company communications. Organizations maintain the fiction because acknowledging that process exists primarily for political and liability reasons undermines the legitimacy of the process.
Why Individual Judgment Becomes Organizationally Unacceptable
Small organizations run on individual judgment. The person closest to the problem makes the decision. This works when failure radius is small, context is shared, and trust is high.
Scale breaks all three conditions. Failure radius grows. A bad decision affects hundreds of customers, thousands of users, millions in revenue. Context fragments. Different teams have different information, different priorities, different incentives. Trust erodes. You do not know if the person making the decision has the necessary context, competence, or judgment.
Individual judgment becomes too risky. The organization cannot tolerate decisions made without visibility, oversight, or coordination. The solution is process. Process makes decisions visible, creates oversight points, and forces coordination.
The cost is speed and autonomy. Decisions that took hours now take days. Decisions that required one person now require five. The organization accepts this because the alternative is worse. Uncoordinated decisions at scale create chaos.
But organizations cannot admit that process exists because individual judgment is no longer trusted. They cannot say “we implemented this workflow because we do not trust you to make good decisions independently.” The message is political suicide.
Instead they frame process as quality improvement, risk management, best practices. The framing preserves morale while achieving the actual goal: removing decision authority from individuals.
Process as Coordination Mechanism That No One Wants to Acknowledge
Most process exists to coordinate independent actors who would otherwise make conflicting decisions. The process is not valuable because it improves individual decisions. It is valuable because it prevents coherent individual decisions from producing incoherent organizational outcomes.
Three teams independently decide to refactor the same shared library. Without coordination, they implement incompatible changes. The library breaks. The organization responds by adding a process requiring notification before shared component changes.
The process does not make refactoring decisions better. It makes conflicting refactoring decisions visible before they cause breakage. The value is coordination, not quality.
Organizations need coordination mechanisms. At small scale, informal communication works. At larger scale, informal communication fails. Information does not propagate. Decisions conflict. Work duplicates. Process provides structure for coordination that does not happen organically.
This is legitimate function. Organizations need ways to ensure independent decisions do not collide. But coordination process is overhead. It slows execution. It creates friction. It is pure cost with no direct value creation.
Organizations cannot celebrate coordination overhead. They cannot say “we added this process to prevent you from making independent decisions that conflict with other teams.” The message sounds like bureaucracy for its own sake.
Instead they frame coordination process as quality process, risk process, governance process. The reframing makes the overhead seem purposeful rather than admitting it is the tax paid for operating at scale.
Why People Pretend Process Does Not Exist
Engineers claim they “just write code.” The code goes through linting, review, testing, security scanning, approval, staging deployment, production deployment, monitoring, and post-deploy validation. The process is extensive. The pretense is that the process is incidental to the work.
Product managers claim they “just ship features.” The feature goes through ideation, prioritization, specification, design review, technical review, implementation, QA, acceptance testing, documentation, rollout planning, and post-launch analysis. The process dominates the timeline. The pretense is that the feature is the work and the process is overhead.
Executives claim they “make decisions.” The decision goes through data gathering, analysis, presentation, review, discussion, alignment meetings, stakeholder buy-in, communication planning, and implementation oversight. The process is most of the work. The pretense is that the decision moment is what matters.
The pretense exists because acknowledging process means acknowledging that most work is coordination, documentation, and approval-seeking. This is psychologically unappealing. People want to believe they add value through their core competence, not through navigating organizational structure.
Admitting that 60% of your time is spent on process means admitting that your job is mostly overhead. This creates cognitive dissonance. The resolution is to minimize process in self-description while executing it in practice.
Why Process Gets Blamed for Everything Except What It Actually Causes
Organizations blame process when execution is slow. “We would move faster without all this bureaucracy.” The process is not why execution is slow. Coordination is why execution is slow. The process is the visible manifestation of the coordination cost. Removing the process does not remove the coordination requirement.
Organizations blame process when decisions are bad. “The approval chain prevented us from making the right call.” The approval chain is not why the decision was bad. Information distribution, incentive misalignment, or judgment failure is why the decision was bad. The process exposed these problems by forcing multiple parties to weigh in. Without the process, the bad decision would have been made faster.
Organizations blame process when innovation stalls. “The review gates kill creativity.” The review gates are not killing creativity. Risk aversion is killing creativity. The gates are where risk aversion becomes visible. Removing the gates means risky ideas get further before being killed, not that they stop being killed.
Process is a convenient scapegoat because it is concrete, visible, and modifiable. Blaming coordination costs, incentive structures, or judgment gaps is harder. These are diffuse, systemic, and difficult to change.
The result is that organizations continuously “improve” process while the underlying problems persist. The approval chain gets streamlined. The number of reviewers gets reduced. The documentation requirements get simplified. Execution remains slow, decisions remain bad, innovation remains stalled.
The process was never the root cause. It was the symptom made visible.
What Process Actually Optimizes For
Process optimizes for defensibility, not outcomes. It creates audit trails showing that decisions followed proper procedure. It distributes accountability across enough people that no individual bears responsibility. It slows execution to the point where political alignment is achievable.
These are legitimate organizational needs. Defensibility matters in regulated industries, litigation-prone environments, or politically charged contexts. Accountability distribution prevents scapegoating and reduces fear of making decisions. Slower execution prevents misalignment that creates expensive rework.
But organizations cannot state these purposes explicitly. “We require approval to ensure decisions are politically defensible” is accurate but unacceptable. “We require approval to ensure quality” is less accurate but more palatable.
The gap between stated purpose and actual function creates dysfunction. Process gets evaluated against efficiency claims it was never designed to meet. People try to optimize process for speed and simplicity when the actual requirement is coverage and defensibility.
Process that successfully achieves its actual purpose while failing its stated purpose gets labeled broken. Attempts to fix it make it worse. The process becomes more efficient at quality checking while becoming less effective at blame distribution. When the next failure occurs, the process is deemed insufficient. More layers are added.
Why Process Never Goes Away
Organizations almost never remove process. Process reduction initiatives announce targets: “Cut approval layers by 50%.” “Eliminate redundant reviews.” “Empower teams to move fast.”
The initiatives fail. Process reduction requires someone to accept the risk that the process was mitigating. That risk is usually a specific past failure that someone with authority declared unacceptable.
Removing the process means accepting that the failure mode could recur. If it recurs, the person who removed the process is responsible. The downside is career risk. The upside is marginal efficiency gain that is hard to measure and harder to credit to a specific decision.
The incentive structure favors preservation. Process accumulates because adding process after failure is mandatory. Process rarely reduces because removing process before failure is optional and risky.
The exception is crisis. Organizations in severe distress will cut process because the alternative is organizational death. The normal state is gradual accretion punctuated by crisis-driven reduction, followed by renewed accretion.
Process grows like bureaucracy grows. It is easier to add than to remove, serves functions that cannot be stated explicitly, and creates constituencies that defend it. The organization that claims to value speed and autonomy continues adding layers that slow everything down.
The Pretense Serves a Function
Organizations pretend process does not exist, or exists only temporarily, or will be removed once certain conditions are met. The pretense is deliberate. It maintains morale, preserves the fiction of meritocracy, and avoids acknowledging that organizational operation is mostly overhead.
Engineers want to believe they are valued for technical skill, not process compliance. Product managers want to believe they are valued for product vision, not stakeholder management. Executives want to believe they are valued for strategic thinking, not political navigation.
Process makes it clear that compliance, coordination, and alignment are the actual job. The pretense preserves the belief that the stated job is the actual job.
The cost is that process cannot be honestly evaluated, optimized, or removed. Organizations remain stuck with process that serves unstated purposes while failing stated goals. The process continues accumulating because acknowledging why it exists would require acknowledging that organizations optimize for defensibility and coordination at the expense of execution speed.
The uncomfortable truth is that process is not a temporary state or a fixable problem. It is the inevitable result of scale, risk aversion, and accountability distribution. Organizations that acknowledge this can design process that honestly serves these purposes. Organizations that maintain the pretense end up with process that fails both its stated goals and its actual function.
Most organizations choose the pretense. The process continues growing. The complaints continue. Nothing changes.