Write the Process Down Before You Automate It

Want a guardrail that costs nothing and prevents almost every AI mess I've seen? Write the process down before you automate it.

Grab a sheet of paper and answer these five questions about the task:

1. What starts it? (A customer email? A Monday morning?)
2. What are the steps, in order?
3. Who does each step today?
4. Where do mistakes usually happen?
5. How do you know it's done right?

If you can't answer all five, you're not ready to automate — and that's useful information, not a failure. It means the process lives in someone's head, and no software can read minds.

This is straight out of my systems playbook: process mapping before tools, always. When I mapped workflows in my grants compliance work, the map itself fixed half the problems. People finally saw the steps they'd been skipping.

Once the answers are on paper, automation gets easy. You can see exactly which step the AI should take, which steps stay human, and where to check the work. The paper becomes your instruction manual and your audit trail in one.

Five questions. One sheet of paper. Do it before you buy anything.

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