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Deep dives into design thinking, creative process, and the intersection of business and aesthetics.
The three-step process that had seventeen steps
A business owner once described their customer onboarding process as “pretty simple.” According to them, there were three basic steps: sign the agreement, collect information, and start the work.
Then they mapped it. What appeared to be three steps quickly became seventeen. There were multiple email exchanges, two approval stages, three spreadsheet updates, duplicate data entry, and several points where work simply sat waiting for someone to take action.
Nobody had intentionally designed the process that way. It had simply evolved. That’s the thing about business processes. The longer they’ve been around, the more likely they are to contain steps that nobody questions anymore.
The work nobody notices
Many inefficiencies remain invisible because they happen gradually. A temporary workaround gets introduced to solve a problem. A manager adds an approval step to reduce risk. Someone creates a spreadsheet because the existing system doesn’t quite do what they need. Each decision makes sense in isolation.
Over time, however, these additions accumulate. Employees become accustomed to the extra steps. Delays become normal. Duplicate work becomes part of the routine. Eventually, nobody notices the inefficiencies because they’ve become embedded in the process itself. It’s a bit like living next to a train track. At first, the noise is impossible to ignore. After a while, you barely notice it’s there.
Finding bottlenecks before customers do
One of the biggest advantages of process mapping is that it exposes bottlenecks. Every business has them. A request sits in someone’s inbox waiting for approval. A department can’t move forward until information arrives from another team. A customer waits because a task is stuck somewhere in the process.
The problem is that bottlenecks often hide in plain sight. Employees become used to waiting, and because delays happen regularly, they stop questioning them. A flowchart makes those delays visible. Once you can see where work slows down, you can start asking why.
Discovering duplicate effort
Another common discovery is duplicate work. Many businesses unknowingly perform the same task multiple times. Information gets copied from one system to another. Employees update several records containing the same data. Different departments collect information that already exists elsewhere.
Nobody notices because each task seems small. But when those small tasks are mapped visually, the waste becomes obvious. What looked like a smooth process suddenly reveals unnecessary effort hidden between the steps.
The problems were already there
One of the biggest misconceptions about process mapping is that it creates problems. It doesn’t. The bottlenecks, delays, duplicate work, and inefficiencies already exist. Mapping simply makes them visible. And once they’re visible, they can finally be addressed.
That’s why some of the most valuable improvements in a business begin with something as simple as drawing a flowchart. The goal isn’t to create documentation. The goal is to understand what’s really happening so you can make it better.
The three-step process that had seventeen steps
A business owner once described their customer onboarding process as “pretty simple.” According to them, there were three basic steps: sign the agreement, collect information, and start the work.
Then they mapped it. What appeared to be three steps quickly became seventeen. There were multiple email exchanges, two approval stages, three spreadsheet updates, duplicate data entry, and several points where work simply sat waiting for someone to take action.
Nobody had intentionally designed the process that way. It had simply evolved. That’s the thing about business processes. The longer they’ve been around, the more likely they are to contain steps that nobody questions anymore.
The work nobody notices
Many inefficiencies remain invisible because they happen gradually. A temporary workaround gets introduced to solve a problem. A manager adds an approval step to reduce risk. Someone creates a spreadsheet because the existing system doesn’t quite do what they need. Each decision makes sense in isolation.
Over time, however, these additions accumulate. Employees become accustomed to the extra steps. Delays become normal. Duplicate work becomes part of the routine. Eventually, nobody notices the inefficiencies because they’ve become embedded in the process itself. It’s a bit like living next to a train track. At first, the noise is impossible to ignore. After a while, you barely notice it’s there.
Finding bottlenecks before customers do
One of the biggest advantages of process mapping is that it exposes bottlenecks. Every business has them. A request sits in someone’s inbox waiting for approval. A department can’t move forward until information arrives from another team. A customer waits because a task is stuck somewhere in the process.
The problem is that bottlenecks often hide in plain sight. Employees become used to waiting, and because delays happen regularly, they stop questioning them. A flowchart makes those delays visible. Once you can see where work slows down, you can start asking why.
Discovering duplicate effort
Another common discovery is duplicate work. Many businesses unknowingly perform the same task multiple times. Information gets copied from one system to another. Employees update several records containing the same data. Different departments collect information that already exists elsewhere.
Nobody notices because each task seems small. But when those small tasks are mapped visually, the waste becomes obvious. What looked like a smooth process suddenly reveals unnecessary effort hidden between the steps.
The problems were already there
One of the biggest misconceptions about process mapping is that it creates problems. It doesn’t. The bottlenecks, delays, duplicate work, and inefficiencies already exist. Mapping simply makes them visible. And once they’re visible, they can finally be addressed.
That’s why some of the most valuable improvements in a business begin with something as simple as drawing a flowchart. The goal isn’t to create documentation. The goal is to understand what’s really happening so you can make it better.