You Improved the Process... But Did You Ask the People in It?

Here’s something I see more often than I’d like to admit... and honestly? I’ve been guilty of it myself.

You spot a problem in how things are running. Maybe a task keeps falling through the cracks, or a handoff between team members is clunky, or something that should take ten minutes somehow swallows an entire afternoon. So you do what any driven, well-meaning founder or manager does. You fix it. You redesign the process, roll it out, and wait for the smooth sailing to begin.

Except... it doesn’t. People are confused. Steps get skipped. Workarounds start popping up like weeds. And within a few weeks, everyone’s quietly gone back to doing things the old way (or worse, some messy hybrid of old and new that nobody fully understands).

Sound familiar?

I saw this happen repeatedly during my corporate days. And I mean in big organisations with dedicated project teams and fancy process mapping software and all the resources you could ask for. This isn’t a “rookie” mistake. It’s not something only small businesses get wrong. It’s one of the most common traps in process improvement, full stop.

And the root cause is almost always the same: the people actually doing the work weren’t in the room when the decisions were made.

It’s not malicious. Usually it comes from a good place... someone genuinely wanting to make things better, moving quickly because the frustration is real and the fix seems obvious. When you redesign a process without involving all the stakeholders, things get overlooked. Issues creep up that break the flow in ways you couldn’t have predicted from the outside. And most of all? People get frustrated. They disengage. They don’t follow the new process because it wasn’t built with their reality in mind. And you’re left picking up the pieces of something that was supposed to make everything easier.


There’s another trap I see a lot, and it’s a subtle one. We often confuse a set of instructions (steps that need to happen in an ideal world) with a proper process. But a real process is so much more than that. It captures eventualities. It has what I think of as “micro-processes” around the main flow... the bits that kick in when things go astray, that bring everything back on track. There’s a method to it. A set of instructions tells you what should happen. A process acknowledges what actually happens and builds in the whole system to handle it.

So if you’re looking at improving a process in your business or organisation, here’s what I’d gently suggest (from someone who’s learned this the hard way, on both sides of the fence).

Start by gathering data and mapping out the current process from a bird’s eye view. Then go deeper... map it in detail and identify where things are genuinely challenged or falling down. And here’s the bit that takes real discipline: refrain from jumping to solutions at this stage. I know. It’s hard. Your brain is already racing ahead to the fix. But sit with the problem a wee bit longer. Let the full picture emerge first.

Then... and this is the part that changes everything... bring in the stakeholders. Every single one of them (or their representatives, at minimum). Let each person define what “better” would look like from where they sit. Because I promise you, their perspective will surface things you’d never have spotted on your own.

From there, you map out the improved process together. You define a testing plan. You test it before you officially launch it. You review, you adjust, and only then do you roll it out for real.

It’s not glamorous. It takes longer than just deciding and implementing. But it works. And more importantly, it sticks... because the people living inside that process helped build it and it allows to capture real-world issues you may not have thought about.


The best process improvements I’ve ever seen (in boardrooms and in one-person businesses alike) weren’t the cleverest or most innovative. They were the ones where everyone felt heard, where the real mess was acknowledged before anyone reached for a solution, and where there was enough patience to test before committing.

Because a process that looks perfect on paper but nobody follows? That’s not improvement. That’s just a nice diagram.

And your business (and your people) deserve more than a nice diagram.