Faster Wrong: When Transformation Accelerates the Wrong Process

IA FORUM MEMBER INSIGHTS: ARTICLE

By Joe Fuqua, Head of Enterprise Intelligent Automation Architecture & Governance, TRUIST

Many transformation efforts begin with confidence and end with a lingering sense that something essential was missed. The failure rarely reveals itself during implementation. Instead, it takes root earlier, in the moment a process is nominated for improvement without being examined closely enough.

I’ve watched organizations modernize systems, digitize workflows, and refine tasks that, in retrospect, were never worth preserving. The technology performs as designed, but the outcomes drift from expectation.

The issue is less about capability than clarity.

Peter Drucker articulated a concern that continues to surface across successive waves of transformation: efficiency can reinforce activities whose underlying purpose was never fully examined. The observation predates contemporary digital initiatives, yet it resonates within them. Organizations often move toward improvement with urgency and conviction, while the quieter work of reconsidering foundational process design receives less deliberate attention.

The dynamic becomes visible at the point of nomination. Processes attract scrutiny because they are labor-intensive, highly visible, or persistently frustrating. Once attention settles on them, activity gathers quickly. Initiatives form, resources shift, and progress begins to be measured in ways that reinforce forward motion. In that environment, the quieter inquiry into whether the process should be simplified, fundamentally redesigned, or retired altogether gradually recedes.

Certain patterns recur with enough consistency that they begin to feel structural rather than accidental.

A common starting point is the workaround that quietly outlives its intended lifespan. Two systems never fully integrate, often because a decision made years earlier deferred the effort. Over time, a manual bridge takes shape. Data is exported, adjusted, and re-entered as part of a routine that becomes familiar and visible. Because the work is repetitive and rule-driven, it attracts improvement attention. The resulting solution performs reliably, yet the integration gap that created the bridge remains untouched and gradually becomes embedded in the improved process. What began as a temporary accommodation slowly assumes the character of infrastructure.

A related pattern emerges when improvement targets a symptom rather than its source. Exception handling workloads, for example, can occupy teams indefinitely. The activity is measurable and persistent, while the upstream instability that generates it, including inconsistent inputs, ambiguous standards, or process variability, sits beyond immediate reach. Improvement reduces the effort required to manage exceptions, yet the conditions producing them remain unchanged. The workload becomes more efficient while the underlying instability continues to generate demand.

A third pattern reflects the quiet accumulation of unnecessary complexity. Processes evolve through successive accommodations, each reasonable in isolation yet collectively transformative. Exceptions harden into standard practice. Manual controls outlive their original purpose. When improvement initiatives arrive, this inherited complexity is treated as immutable. Solutions adapt to every branch and contingency, reinforcing a design that may have been more elaborate than necessary from the start. Subsequent change exposes fragility across multiple points simultaneously.

In each instance, improvement initiatives succeed in executing their mandate. The difficulty lies in what that mandate preserved.

Research examining transformation and automation failures consistently identifies process selection and process readiness as recurring contributors to underperformance, reinforcing the observation that early decisions in improvement efforts often shape outcomes more than the implementation itself.

Experience across operational improvement efforts points to a consistent observation. Efficiency applied without understanding can accelerate the very inefficiencies it seeks to remove. Lean and Six Sigma traditions placed unusual emphasis on process stability, standardization, and the careful identification of waste before optimization began. Over time, many transformation initiatives retained the language of these disciplines while drifting from their underlying practice.

The most consequential intervention often occurs before improvement work formally starts. It lies in seeing the process as it actually unfolds, shaped by informal adaptations, undocumented exceptions, and accumulated accommodations, rather than as it appears in diagrams or procedure manuals.

A brief pause before improvement begins can introduce a different kind of discipline, one grounded less in speed and more in clarity. Several questions tend to surface during that pause:

• Does the process behave consistently over time, or does it vary across teams and scenarios?

• Are inputs sufficiently standardized to support predictable outcomes?

• Do certain steps exist primarily to absorb upstream instability?

• Would a careful review remove steps altogether before attempting to improve them?

These questions seldom slow progress in a meaningful way. They tend instead to redirect it. Some processes move forward with greater confidence. Others return for redesign and re-emerge with less hidden fragility. Occasionally, the exercise reveals something more fundamental. The process itself may no longer serve a necessary purpose.

Organizations that introduce this moment of scrutiny into their transformation efforts often pursue fewer improvement initiatives overall. The initiatives that do proceed tend to endure longer, demand less ongoing intervention, and align more closely with their original intent. Experience, in this context, shapes more than execution capability. It gradually sharpens judgment about where improvement effort truly belongs.

Transformation itself remains indispensable. Organizations must continually refine how work is performed and how supporting systems evolve alongside that work. Yet the value realized from these efforts often traces back to a decision made early and with insufficient reflection, the choice of what warrants improvement in the first place.

The decision itself rarely presents as technical. It reflects a discipline grounded in process understanding, the recognition of waste, and respect for design integrity. Acting on that discipline requires confronting upstream instability instead of quietly accommodating it, simplifying inherited complexity, and revisiting practices that have become embedded through habit rather than necessity.

Among the most consequential improvement choices is the decision to pause. Returning a process for reconsideration can be more valuable than advancing it directly into implementation.

Drucker’s observation continues to resonate across successive waves of transformation. Efficiency applied to the wrong activity alters speed without altering outcome.

The result is simply faster wrong.

Author Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the Author alone and are shared in a personal capacity, in accordance with the Chatham House Rule. They do not reflect the official views or positions of the Author’s employer, organization, or any affiliated entity.