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Process Ailments - Try vs. Buy


I went a little too hard over the holiday. Woke up with an angry knee and immediately convinced myself it was catastrophic. Not a strain. Not a tweak. Nope—clearly a blood clot delivered by some mythical spider. That’s where my head went… straight to worst-case.


A week later, a physical therapist poked around and said the quiet part out loud: “You’re tight. Quad and hamstring. Stretch, walk, hydrate.” Translation—this isn’t a compound fracture. It’s soft-tissue maintenance I’d skipped.


Here’s the jump to work: leaders do the same thing with processes. A report runs late, a handoff drops, a dashboard stops updating, and we spiral into “burn it down, buy something new.” The knee hurts, so we start shopping for a replacement knee.

The funny thing? If it were truly a compound fracture, you’d know. The org would swarm. Alarms would be obvious. Most of what slows teams down is soft-tissue work, nagging pains from brittle rituals, stale assumptions, and neglected upkeep. You can limp for months. You can also fix most of it with targeted stretching: clearer handoffs, smaller queues, tighter feedback loops.


Replacement feels decisive. Maintenance feels invisible. Buying an ERP or a new SaaS is a calendar invite with a vendor, a board slide, a go-live date. Trying—actually rehabbing how the work flows today—is messy, local, and human. But here’s the paradox: the benefits you credit to “the new system” usually come from the rehab you were finally forced to do to make the new system work.


If you want the impact of “buy” without the disruption tax, run a “try” like a product launch:

  1. Name it so leaders can see it. “Code-name Watermelon” beats “process improvement initiative.” Give the work a shape, a Slack channel, and an owner. Visibility buys patience.

  2. Measure the tissue, not just the bone. Track cycle time, rework rate, and downstream questions generated per deliverable. Example: that monthly “pretty” executive deck—how many clarifying emails does it trigger? If aesthetics go up while questions stay flat, you’re polishing pain.

  3. Prescribe a short rehab block. Four weeks, scoped to one flow: one report, one handoff, one integration. Keep a bias toward removal: fewer fields, fewer steps, fewer approvals. If you need a rule, use this: anything that moves forward without a decision probably never needed a meeting.

  4. Protect the try with executive airtime. Five minutes at the staff meeting—every week—where the sponsor says, “We’re keeping the deliverable stable for 90 days. No cosmetic changes. We’re fixing how it’s made, not how it looks.” That single sentence saves entire teams from churn.

  5. Re-baseline the ritual, not just the tool. After the gains show up (and they will), lock them in: document the new handoff, automate the status change, pin the checklist. If it isn’t ritualized, it will regress the second the next urgent thing lands.


A quick caution: sometimes you do need replacement. Knees wear out. So do platforms. But treat “replace” as the last, not first, resort. If the only path your culture trusts is “buy,” you’ll keep paying for new knees when you really needed a stretch band and a walk.


Process Debt Truth: Most organizations don’t suffer compound fractures—they suffer tight hamstrings. Stretch the work before you swap the joint.

 
 
 

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