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As you say companies adopt a rationale “that it takes more time in the here and now to win people over and make sure they ‘get it’, than it takes to alter a document with prescriptions. But in the long run doing the latter costs you more, first in terms of human creative and relational capital, due to which your quality of service will diminish, which will hurt your bottom line.”

What you have to add to that equation is that for many service companies the people in a lot of front-line jobs are considered as essentially expendable. For those companies rigid process is the way to get those jobs done at the lowest possible employment costs and be able to still offer the overall “service” regardless of the turnover that causes.

To me process is ever present, and a pattern of relationships, or from the view point of information or objects a flowpath through relationships. Processes coalesce quickly and naturally around tasks and pieces of information, often allowing for or creating new relationships along the way. (This is where Jyri Engestroms objects of sociality are a great way of seeing things)

So information and relationships are both needed and both can’t stand by themselves. Relationships are more persistent than singular pieces of info, which is why I could loose my blog archives and still be ok. But relationships whither when information stops flowing through them, disappearing like unused muscles. So if I loose my blog archives it is ok, as long as I keep pumping new info into and striking up new conversations with my relationships. Nobody cares about the pictures I put up in Flickr last year, it’s the ones I post today that get the conversation going (if any).

Organisational procedures, i.e. processes made explicit, can work two ways: descriptive and prescriptive.

When it’s descriptive it is a representation of collective experience on how to perform tasks in an easy way, a quick reference for co-workers, and a basis to grow new practices on (descriptive processes often contain references as to why things are organised a certain way, so that conversation is triggered when those why’s are no longer valid.) This is how procedures were originally meant I think in quality assurance systems: living structures that evolve. People follow descriptive procedures not because they must, but because that is what makes the most sense to do, and the procedures are a reflection of how they work. People are the goal here, and the procedures serve to facilitate them.

Prescriptive procedures, like Taylor’s scientific management, work the other way around. Now the work must reflect the procedure. Such procedures turn into unquestioned (but relentlessly bemoaned)laws quickly, because the rationale behind it is not getting the job done easily for workers, but controlling employee behaviour and make it predictable. People are a means here and serve the output parameters of the procedures. It is not about helping the workers, but a power tool in the hands of management. Often these procedures become their own point of reference and thus cut out context resulting in dehumanization of the people in an organisation.

Procedures that started out descriptive turn into prescriptive ones quite often, the way I see it, when organisations try to spread new insights on how to do the work better. Instead of showing people what works better, and winning them over for that new way of working, procedures are simply altered and people are told to follow them without questions. The rationale behind that is that it takes more time in the here and now to win people over and make sure they ‘get it’, than it takes to alter a document with prescriptions. But in the long run doing the latter costs you more, first in terms of human creative and relational capital, due to which your quality of service will diminish, which will hurt your bottom line.

Descriptive procedures reflecting existing processes are like skeletons on which you can grow. It provides structure but doesn’t lock you in.
Prescriptive procedures are reflecting processes ‘wished for’ by management, that turn into harnesses hemming you in and ultimately becoming an obstacle to your organisation.

Lots of reorganisations of companies are caused by this in my eyes, as they try to move from one set of prescriptive instructions to another, from one status quo to another. Which brings you up to date at the most but never prepares for unknowns in your future. There change is an incident, although a repetitive incident.
Using descriptive procedures on the other hand allows for more fluent adaption, viewing change as the only constant.

I think I better put this up as a blogpost as well

As the front-line service jobs become more and more de-valued, I suspect we will get to a point where they disappear completely – people with a problem will either have to self-diagnose via some kind of website (lots of that already) or literally talk to a computer. The messy difficult stuff would still get routed to an expert (think Google Answers maybe?)?

Earl’s set another thread running over here which seems to relate to this…

Generally, most of hwat you have described re: process and the putting of process into enterprise / CRM software ends up “pouring electrionic concrete” over business process in search of consistency and efficiency .. and “de-humanizes” to some extent the value people and conversations (often seeking to provide better service to people-based customers bring to the process of continuously meeting and improving response to the endless variability that are customers (especially in the increasingly online environment, where demographics, psychographics and other methods for “targetting” become hindrances as much as enablers).

I think it’s right that there are structural dissonances .. perhaps interoperable and more flexible web services will eventually resolve or harmonize some of that dissonance ? Hey .. what do I know ? I’m a born iconoclast.