Ross Mayfield’s Weblog: The End of Process
A brilliant post on the pernicious P-word, Process, which yields the wonderful quote from Clay Shirky: "Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity."
I offer my own, cribbed from a column from the old Industry Standard, author unknown as the @#$^@$% archives are nowhere to be found and are probably moldering somewhere on a server, unspidered and lost. Anyway, that column had the line: "Process is for people who get out of the shower to take a piss."
"A process is like a standard. It provides a common definition for others to build upon. This is generally a good thing. In technical systems it helps resolve complexity so higher order abstractions can keep things simple. But even in technical systems, efficiency comes at a cost of adaptation. In social systems, especially where not everyone helps design what they participate in, the constraints against adaptation are compounded."
