The Process Disease

I'm a software designer. I design User Interfaces to make them easier and more intuitive to use - so that users can not only accomplish things with software, but be comfortable with the knowledge that they're accomplishing something.

The job involves being very "goal oriented"; figuring out a vision of what your user is supposed to be trying to accomplish, and then delivering it. If you don't know where you're going, you'll not only never know when you get there - you'll never know how to get there, either.

The bane of my existence are the people in the organization who call themselves "process police". In the "process-oriented" world they inhabit, it doesn't really matter where you're going - as long as your path there is documentable, traceable and orderly. I'm exaggerating, naturally - some process people have a keen sense of what needs to be done, and they accomplish it - otherwise, no software would ever get done. At its worst, though, eternal focus on "process" is a means of systematically providing oneself plausible deniability for accomplishing nothing. Mocking "Process people" has made Scott Adams a rich man.

So look at the world today; the world of crisis diplomacy, like the world of software development, is full of processes that are creaking to bloody, horrific halts, because people, events, reality aren't cooperating.

The contrast in desired, stated (and in the case of this past year, real-life) approaches to terror and Saddam Hussein's outlawry throw this contrast into stark relief. What did Bush do? He went forth and vanquished the enemy.

For what do his opponents endlessly pine? A "process" - without filling in details (fair enough if you don't know them) or filling agenda-based details (the UN? Oh, whatever) or failing to fill in a goal (stupid). (No, I mean that . Stupid).

Democrat foreign policy, and its focus on "process" without "goal" (Dead and imprisoned terrorists, objectively safer USA) is, like introducing "process" to a dysfunctional company, a clinical-sounding way to camouflage inability to make a decision - or at least to make the tough politially-dicey decisions.

Bush focused on the goal - elimination of terrorism and its sponsoring countries - immediately. He followed up on that focus with action - action that's been exceptionally successful.

That kind of thing, successful or not, drives "Process" people (or, as Al Gore refers to them, "Protheth people") crazy.