Processes, People & Culture

It has been more than three years since I wrote about my Indigo fandom. Since then, they have been my preferred airline, mostly thanks to their on-time promise. A few weeks ago, Karthik wrote an excellent post “Why I love an errant Meru and hate the awesome Indigo!” that offered some unique perspectives based on a few of his recent experiences with the airline. He ends the post with When did the ‘plastic’ nature of Indigo’s customer-facing organization set in? May be around the same time their hostesses were asked to use wigs? It restored a sense of objectivity to my fandom.

“Our way of doing things” is how one definition of culture goes and I remembered Gautam’s recent insightful post on the components that make up ‘culture’ in an organisation. If you look at these factors, you’d wonder whether a cultural change was at the root of Indigo’s new avatar. It made me think of something I wrote earlier – Culture Architecture – the thrust of which  was culture being a strategic business advantage. But how can that be made sustainable? I’ve been a big fan of processes. Indeed, one of my favourite posters is

(via)

But recent experiences and thoughts have made me wonder – what are processes for? In addition to scaling with efficiency, (in this context) isn’t it also a check against bad judgment? Key decision makers can’t be everywhere and look into everything all the time, processes reduce the risk. But over a period of time, processes become gospels and few stop to think of why a certain thing is done in a certain way. When these blind judgment calls happens on the customer facing side is probably when things become plastic.

One way to prevent this is to have agile processes that are built to consider various factors periodically and remain iterative. The other way is to hire (and train) people on good judgment, and confidently be a Nordstrom. Culture has both people and processes and while they both have their roles to play, I am now learning that it’s people who can make the process work, or break it.

P.S. Referral plays an important role in this context, and this post  is a great read not just on that count, but also the message it has for the workforce.