Every Process Shapes Behaviour

Every organisation designs processes. Some are intended to improve quality. Others strengthen governance, reduce risk, increase visibility or create greater consistency as an organisation grows. Leadership teams debate policies, define approval limits, document operating procedures and carefully construct governance frameworks because these things create order in increasingly complex organisations. They determine how work should flow, who should make decisions and where accountability ultimately sits.

Viewed from that perspective, process design appears to be a largely technical exercise. The discussion centres on efficiency, compliance, controls and operating models. The assumption is that, once the correct process has been designed and communicated, people will naturally adopt it because it represents a better way of working.

My experience has led me to a different conclusion.

Over the years, I have become convinced that every process shapes behaviour, whether its designers intended it or not. The process itself may exist on paper, but its true impact only becomes visible when it collides with the realities of everyday work. What ultimately determines success is not the elegance of the process design but the behaviours it encourages once people begin living with it.

That distinction is easy to overlook because organisations do not experience their own processes. People do. An employee is not thinking about governance while booking a business trip, nor is a manager reflecting on organisational design while approving an invoice. A service desk analyst responding to a customer request is simply trying to complete the task in front of them with the least possible effort and interruption. The organisation may see policies and workflows; the individual experiences only the work itself.

Those experiences are built from hundreds of seemingly insignificant interactions that rarely appear on a process map. An unnecessary approval. Information that has to be entered twice. Work that sits in somebody else's queue. The need to switch between multiple systems to complete what should be a routine activity. None of these moments appears especially important in isolation, yet together they create the lived experience of working inside an organisation. Over time, that experience shapes behaviour far more effectively than any policy document ever could.

Perhaps this explains why organisations so often underestimate the complexity of process change. A new process is rarely introduced into an empty organisation. Instead, it is introduced into an environment that has already adapted to the existing way of working. Employees have developed habits, shortcuts, trusted relationships and countless small routines that allow them to navigate their day almost without thinking. Those behaviours were not necessarily designed. They emerged because they made work easier, and years of repetition gradually turned them into instinct.

Changing a process therefore means much more than publishing a new procedure or implementing a new technology. It means asking people to replace behaviours that may have taken years to develop with entirely new ones. In many respects, it is rather like changing the wheel on a car travelling at one hundred kilometres per hour. The organisation sees a redesigned workflow; the employee experiences an interruption to a way of working that has become almost automatic. The technical implementation may take a few months. The behavioural transition often takes considerably longer.

I learned this lesson while running the European division of a global services organisation. We introduced a dedicated workflow platform to replace an operational process that had gradually become dependent on shared email inboxes. From the organisation's perspective, the business case was compelling. We wanted greater visibility into operational activity, clearer ownership of work, measurable service levels and a better understanding of where bottlenecks were emerging. The implementation itself was carefully managed and the new workflow was objectively more capable than the one it replaced.

Even so, people continued returning to the shared inboxes whenever they had the opportunity. At the time, we interpreted this as resistance to change, an explanation that seemed perfectly reasonable. Looking back, I believe we misunderstood what was actually happening. We thought we were introducing a better workflow. In reality, we were asking people to abandon behaviours that had become instinctive through years of repetition. The existing process may have been inefficient from the organisation's perspective, but from the employee's perspective it demanded very little conscious effort.

One conversation changed my understanding completely. An employee asked whether the new platform meant management would now be monitoring every action they performed before adding, "Don't you trust me?" That was never our intention. We wanted greater visibility into the work, not greater surveillance of the people performing it. Yet organisations communicate through design just as much as they communicate through words. We believed we had improved operational governance. Some employees experienced increased personal scrutiny.

That experience taught me something I had not previously appreciated. People do not respond to the process we design. They respond to the process they experience. Those two things are often closely aligned, but they are not necessarily the same, and it is within that gap that many transformation programmes either succeed or quietly begin to struggle.

The contrast became even clearer some time later when we introduced another platform, this time to manage business travel and expense approvals. The organisational objectives were remarkably similar. Once again, we wanted stronger governance, greater visibility and improved financial control. The employee experience, however, was fundamentally different. People no longer needed to use personal credit cards, wait weeks for reimbursements or navigate multiple disconnected systems simply to arrange business travel. Governance became stronger, not because employees were compelled to comply, but because the intended process also happened to make their lives easier.

Looking back, I no longer believe the difference had much to do with the technology itself. One implementation primarily improved the organisation's experience of the process, while the other improved the organisation's experience and the employee's experience simultaneously. One asked people to change their behaviour for the benefit of the organisation. The other aligned organisational objectives with individual convenience, making the desired behaviour the easiest behaviour.

Product designer Don Norman observed that good design makes the desired action feel natural, while poor design forces people to compensate for the shortcomings of the system. Although he was writing about everyday products rather than organisations, the principle translates remarkably well. When people consistently work around a process, our instinct is often to question their compliance or commitment. It may be more productive to question the experience we have designed for them instead.

This is why I have gradually come to see workarounds differently. Every unofficial spreadsheet, every shadow database, every shared mailbox and every personal tracker tells a story about the environment in which people are expected to work. They are not always evidence of poor discipline. More often, they reveal a gap between what the organisation intended people to experience and what they actually experience each day. They are feedback, not simply about the process itself, but about the behavioural consequences of its design.

The implication is an important one. A process may be thoughtfully conceived, implemented with care and supported by excellent communication, yet still produce behaviours that nobody anticipated. That does not necessarily mean the design was poor or the intentions misguided. It simply reminds us that behaviour is shaped less by what we intended people to experience than by what they actually experience every day. If those two realities diverge, another communication campaign or another round of training is unlikely to resolve the problem. The experience itself almost certainly needs to be redesigned.

Perhaps, then, the most important question leaders should ask after any significant process change is not, "Did we implement the process we designed?" but rather, "What behaviours has this process actually created?" The answer may reveal far more about the quality of the design than any implementation milestone or compliance report ever could.

Ultimately, successful organisational design is not measured by the elegance of its governance framework or the completeness of its operating manual. It is measured by the behaviours it consistently encourages once real people begin using it. Organisations that understand this do not simply design better processes. They design better experiences, recognising that behaviour is shaped not by intention alone, but by the reality people encounter every day.

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