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Bad Process Kills Good People



“Hey, what’s up Toby? We made it another week.”


And if your week included insane weather, unhinged headlines, and a football game that made you question your life choices… welcome to the club.


But here’s the thing. When the news gets loud, it’s easy to get pulled into the politics of it all. This week, I want to do something different. I want to look underneath the argument and ask the question we ask on this podcast every week:


What process produced the outcome we’re staring at?

Because outcomes don’t show up out of nowhere. They’re manufactured. Sometimes intentionally. Sometimes accidentally. And sometimes… the process doesn’t just create waste. It creates harm.


The Stanford Prison Experiment, and the Power of a Costume

I keep coming back to the Stanford Prison Experiment from 1971.


The short version: take a bunch of regular college students, randomly assign them “guard” or “prisoner,” give them uniforms, roles, and a setting… and watch what happens. It was supposed to run for a week or two. It got shut down on day six because it escalated into abuse. Fast.


And if you’ve ever read about it, one detail sticks with you: the role changes the person. The costume changes the behavior. The identity shifts because the system rewards it.


I saw a tiny, harmless version of this in my own life. My wife works nights, so I’m trying not to wake her up. I’m in the living room stretching… in jeans. Which is objectively weird. Stretching has an “approved uniform” in our culture, and denim ain’t it.


But I didn’t care, because I knew why I was doing it.


That’s the point.


Uniforms and rituals don’t just signal behavior to other people. They program behavior in us.


So when you give someone a badge, tactical gear, authority, and a role that screams “you’re the enforcer,” don’t act surprised when their posture changes. Their tone changes. Their threshold changes.


That’s not politics. That’s process.


Hiring Is a Process… and It Selects for Identity

The next process is hiring.


We love to pretend hiring is about skills. It’s not. Hiring is about incentives. It’s about who says “yes” to a job, and why.


If I’m a middle-aged software developer in San Francisco, am I applying for an enforcement role? Probably not.


If I’m unemployed, angry, feel left behind, and someone offers purpose, authority, and a paycheck… I’m more likely to apply.


And if the hiring process is thin, rushed, or “do you have a pulse?” then you’re not filtering for judgment. You’re filtering for willingness. There’s reporting suggesting ICE hiring and training standards have been compressed dramatically in recent months, alongside recruiting pushes and large bonuses.


Again—process.


If you hire fast, you get bodies .If you hire carefully, you get professionals. And if you hire ideologically, you get believers.


Budgets, Protected Status, and the Death Spiral of Accountability

Then there’s the budget process. Every business leader knows this one:


Use it or lose it.

Budgets don’t just fund activity. They incentivize activity. If the organization gets rewarded for spending and punished for restraint, you shouldn’t be shocked when spending turns into expansion, and expansion turns into overreach.


Add in “protected status”—that special kind of immunity where people learn, over time, that consequences don’t apply—and the process gets even uglier.


And then you stack anonymity on top. Covered faces. No names. No accountability. “I’m just doing my job.”


That’s how basic humanity gets deleted from the workflow.


The Bright Spot: Humane Process Scales Too

Here’s what I found encouraging, though.


In Minnesota, when the National Guard showed up amid protests, some of the first images weren’t of escalation. They were of guardsmen handing out donuts, coffee, and hot chocolate.


That matters.


Because it proves something we often forget: humane process scales too.

If bad process can manufacture cruelty—then good process can manufacture care. It can manufacture restraint. It can manufacture trust.


And that’s the core lesson I want to land today:


You don’t get the world you say you want. You get the world your systems are built to produce.


Process Debt Truth: Most organizations don’t fail because they choose the wrong mission. They fail because their process quietly trains people to betray it.

 
 
 

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