[Orou]

> By contrast, most knowledge work today operates with no deliberate structure at all. Instead of carefully constructed processes to get the most out of each person, we just hand out tasks and leave people to organise themselves organically in whatever way feels easiest to them.

I've very much felt this pain in a few of my roles. I understand the need for this sort of many-hats-wearing, elbow-greased approach to solving business problems in a startup. But it's infuriating working in late-stage startups (or even mid-sized tech companies) that fail to get away from this 'throw people at the problem' mentality and spend the time and resources to explicitly define what the business' core processes are and how they work.

I know not everyone thinks about problems in terms of process flows, but it still drives me crazy!

[jkhdigital]

I think The Phoenix Project does a pretty good job of diagnosing the problem: in knowledge work, the WIP is generally not visible. Not only that, the WIP often consists of simply entries in a database or files on a hard drive, so there is effectively an infinite capacity for creating and storing more WIP.

Even with well-defined processes, poor instrumentation for revealing the true scale of the backlog at each stage can lead to this “always firefighting” mode of operation.