Process does not exit for it’s parts
About a year ago I was was walking around in the Old Market Hall in Helsinki and decided to have a coffee. The cafe there was a small one fitting roughly 20 or so customers and had two waiters —or baristas, how ever you want to call them— so the staff-to-client ratio was high. The waiters were doing what many service staff are doing: maintaining the chain. One was washing the dishes and the other one was tidying up, filling the on-hand-stock and organizing: essentially ensuring everything runs smoothly when an order gets placed. What they forgot, while concentrating on the parts of the process, was the process itself, the purpose they are there: taking and fulfilling the orders. While I was observing and waiting to place an order it was enough time to develop a queue, not a long one, just three customers, but still a queue. And this was within time span of few minutes, perhaps 5 in total, which should be enough time to serve three coffees or at least take the orders. They forgot that the purpose of the process they were maintaining is to “serve coffee to paying customers”. This is not unique to cafes, Finnish workforce, or service staff general but it happens to all of us in a way or other. Yes, a clean cup is important; no-one likes to drink coffee from a dirty cup. Yes, it is handy to have sales stock on-hand; no-one likes to wait while the waiter needs to run away. But neither is what the process is for. They are inputs to a process, but individually they have no value to the output. I am not there to purchase a clean cup or a quickly available bag of sugar, they will affect to my decision to buy and how much I’m willing to pay, but the are parts of the process — not the reason exists.
From the point of view of the process the value of a part is zero. Only when these parts are combined it creates the value for the process; the purpose why these actions are taken. Naturally a process often consists of processes, sub-processes or inputs, which may have various levels of importance, but none of them provides value to the process individually. If they would, the other parts of the process would be redundant. Process is emergence in it’s purest form: individual parts have little, or no value from the view of the output, but when they are combined the parts create value through their outputs. Parts alone are worthless.
Occasionally it is important to remind yourself of the larger image and the purpose of the small things we do.
