Are We Automating Work, or Just Automating the Mess?

I don't like clean systems because they look impressive.

I like them because messy systems waste everybody's time.

When a system is messy, weird things happen:

• Leads come in, but nobody follows up.
• A client pays, but onboarding starts late.
• The same information gets copied into three places.
• Tasks exist, but nobody owns them.
• Reports become something people don't trust.

And then the business starts thinking it has a people problem.

Sometimes it does. But often, it has a system problem.

I've noticed this while working with real businesses. People are busy switching between calls, CRMs, forms, calendars, and messages. When the underlying process is unclear, everyone has to compensate manually.

A clean system should answer five questions:

1. Where does this information go?
2. What happens next?
3. Who owns it?
4. What does its current status mean?
5. How do we know something went wrong?

And here's the part I find interesting:

Automation on top of a messy system can make the mess travel faster.

You can automate a broken handoff, but that doesn't make the handoff reliable.

Before adding another workflow, perhaps we should ask whether the process itself makes sense.

Question: Have you ever removed an automation because simplifying the process worked better?

I'd love to hear examples.

---

Originally published on Ahmad Yar.