A look into my process

Two weeks ago I mentioned that this past year had been learning about who we are, where this year coming will be all about learning how we work best. I saw this tweet this past week and laughed about how much it resonated with me and where we are at.

In the new year , a new hire will be joining our team as the VP of Design. She has ten years of agency experience and a deep systems mind. She is a key component in bringing structure to our process. During our conversations this week, she was asking me about our current process I felt like sending the above image, because it is constantly changing and evolving.

In every project that we have done over the past year we have learned extremely valuable lessons and I think it would be safe to say that no two projects have followed the same process. One could and probably should argue that this means there is no process, which is fair, but I think it’s more of a testament to the team’s adaptability. To be asking, how might this have gone better and how can we apply these learnings. Although it has worked so far, it’s not scalable and breaks as we grow.

I know that documenting and refining our process is the next step, because we are nearly at the breaking point in our growth. If we were to focus all of our efforts into building the perfect process earlier we would have failed. As the saying goes you don’t know what you don’t know. Perhaps with a nascent company you need to let the process remain fluid and focus on quick learnings. When there is a structure forming around what the business actually is, you can then and then only begin to turn these learnings into a process.

I used to feel guilty about the fact that we would continually be changing our process project to project, but I think that it was much more indicative  of where we were as a business and less about being “disorganized”.

If there is a point to be gathered from this short Christmas ramble I guess it would be this; have grace with yourself. Often what feels like a weakness or a stumbling block is a necessary component of your identity that will take you on the journey you need to go on.