The New Automation Mindset

CHAPTER 2The Process Mindset

“If you just focus on the smallest details, you never get the big picture right.”

—Leroy Hood

We buy apps to solve problems and add capabilities. They complete tasks or make groups of tasks easier. But the tasks are not isolated; assembled together they make up processes, which make up businesses. We're all buying apps for tasks, but is anyone thinking about how they affect the whole? To understand how the tasks fit into the big picture, we need to apply systems thinking.

In Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline, he describes systems thinking in this way: “Business[es] … are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it's doubly hard to see the whole pattern of change. Instead, we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get solved.”¹

If one phrase can describe the last 15 years of technology, it might be “There's an app for that!” It captures the prevalence of a task‐centric technology mindset. In the US, companies have loaded up on software for tasks, yet average productivity increases at a meager 1 percent per year. For comparison, during the period between 1996 and 2004, productivity grew on average more than 3 percent per year, and in the postwar boom of the 1950s and 1960s, 3.8 percent per year.²

A recent study unearthed something that many of us intuitively ...