The Number One Reason why Process Initiatives Fail

If you did a study of how processes in your organization changed over time using our Process Diagnostics, you would find that in general our organizations are actually engineering more causes of work into our processes all the time. This is also the number one cause behind the increase in complexity that is making our lives so difficult.

Yet the only way we can significantly reduce the non value-added work in our organizations is by eliminating causes of work. That’s the difference between the IPAPI approach and other approaches to process improvement. Rather than continuing in a cycle of affect-fixing (that creates more and more affects)... we identify and eliminate the very causes or work. The difference in results from these two basic approaches is profound.

The second type of non value-added work comes from how we choose to think about the work that we do. So often we focus our efforts on changing aspects of a process without really understanding what the overall nature of that process is and the purpose it is intended to serve. But that can never work. We must base our efforts on the intended purpose of each process if we are to achieve value creation; to do that we must step back and get a broader perspective on each process. Unfortunately the degree of detail we typically use to describe processes is far too much for us to ever get ourselves into this perspective.