Process: Red Tape or Power Tool?

Say the word process in a meeting and watch the room flinch.

People hear it and think: control, rigidity, red tape, bureaucracy. Something imposed on humans rather than created with them. Something cold. Something slow.

But here's the irony:

We’re all running on processes already. Even the spontaneous ones.

You have a process for how you answer emails.

You have a process for how you fall asleep.

You have a process for how you avoid conflict, or how you push into it.

We are full of scripts, loops, patterns.

So why is it only when we name them, when we try to see them, that it suddenly feels oppressive?

Maybe it’s not the process that’s the problem.

Maybe it’s the fact that most people have no idea which one they’re running.

This shows up everywhere at work. We reject the word process like it’s some kind of corporate threat, so we nod at it, tolerate it, maybe document it, but don’t live it.

We follow just enough to tick the box.

We miss the power of what it could do.

The ability to see a process, really see it, isn’t about control. It’s about freedom.

Because once something is visible, it can be understood, made ours.

Once it’s understood, it can be tweaked.

And that’s where change lives. Not in vague ambition, but in the invisible patterns we stop to rewire.

Workplaces, relationships, personal growth - they all depend on process.

The difference is whether you’re at the mercy of one, or in partnership with it.

And the leader’s job?

Isn’t to throw down process for others to follow.

It’s to reveal it as what it truly is:

a hardcore power tool.