Automate the Process, Not the Mess

Some of my favorite work was process mapping: sitting with a team, tracing how work actually flowed, finding where it broke. The rule was ironclad — you map the process first, fix what's broken, and only then talk about systems. Automating a broken process just produces broken results faster.

Then AI arrived, and everyone skipped the first two steps.

I watch teams bolt AI onto processes nobody has mapped, much less fixed. The intake workflow that already loses forms. The approval chain nobody understands. Then they're surprised when the AI faithfully reproduces the chaos at machine speed.

Don't automate chaos.

If a process is too tangled to explain to a new hire, it's too tangled to hand to a model. Map it. Fix the obvious breaks. Then — and only then — ask what AI should do.

The technology is the last step, not the first. My grants and systems years taught me that order, and AI hasn't changed it.

I explain frameworks; I don't give legal counsel.