The Flexibility That Costs You the Future
Your company's most important processes work every day and live in someone's memory. Inside, this is called flexibility. Seen from outside, through the eyes of a buyer or a new hire, it has another name.
The future is sloved together by Burcu Fidan for Fine Acts
Selling. Walking away. This series takes the thought seriously. Six weeks, six dependencies to dismantle, one pact: an organization that runs even without you. Third stop: unwritten processes.
Ask Mary
The order from the German client comes in, the one with the special specs and the logistics done backwards. The new salesperson looks at it and asks how it's handled. The answer comes from three desks away, without eyes ever leaving the screen. Ask Mary, she knows how it's done.
Every company has its Marys. The process exists, has worked for years, produces revenue. It just happens to live in one person's memory. No document describes it, nobody has ever mapped it end to end, and Mary's version differs in a few spots from the version of the colleague who covers her vacation. The work travels along trails nobody decided on and nobody governs.
This stop goes one level deeper. Even when people decide on their own, the how-it's-done keeps traveling along those trails. And trails, unlike roads, exist only as long as someone walks them.
The trail and the map
The unwritten trail has real advantages. It adapts fast, handles exceptions with elegance, accommodates the client who wants the invoice one way and the supplier who delivers another. For a twenty-person company it is the most efficient organizational form in existence. The problem arrives with growth, and it arrives in silence.
Headcount grows and the new hire learns by shadowing, at the pace of whoever does the shadowing. Volumes rise and the trail clogs, because it carries the pace of whoever blazed it. Quality starts depending on the shift: with Mary the German order runs smooth, without her people improvise. No single episode does damage. The sum sketches a company that has outgrown the scale its trails were beaten for, without yet having built the roads.
New machines on unwritten processes
The Italian version of this story has precise numbers. Under the Transizione 4.0 plan, according to the final evaluation report by the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Enterprise and the Bank of Italy, Italian companies accrued roughly 35 billion euros in tax credits between 2020 and 2023, and 80 percent went into tangible assets: machinery, plants, production lines. The report registers positive effects on investment and employment, with productivity gains concentrated mostly in micro and small firms. Translated: many companies bought excellent technology and laid it on top of workflows that stayed identical.
Economic research explains why the full return is slow to arrive. The studies by Brynjolfsson, Rock and Syverson on the productivity J-curve, based on American data but built on a mechanism that holds everywhere, show that technologies pay off only after the complementary investments no balance sheet records: redesigned processes, new skills, reorganized work. A digitalized line feeding a never-rewritten flow produces the same trail as before, walked faster. The bottleneck moves downstream, where the same memory keeps deciding and coordinating.
The name a buyer gives it
In operational due diligence the same request always arrives: show us how you work. The buyer looks for procedures, documented flows, exception rules. On discovering that the real answer is a list of people to call, the price gets updated. We have seen how much a company that depends on its owner gets discounted. Trail dependence is the same disease, distributed: the company works, but its workings cannot be handed over. Inside, it's called flexibility. In the data room it's called operational risk, and it has a price. We wrote about it describing the move from heroic growth to an organization designed to scale: the heroic phase produces trails, the adult phase demands roads.
The ten-line exercise
Identify the three processes that carry the most revenue. The order coming in, the product going out, the payment coming back, or the right ones for your case. Then ask the people who run them to describe them in ten lines, without preparing and without copying from anywhere, because there is nowhere to copy from.
The real test comes with the comparison. Have two people who do the same job write the same ten lines and lay the sheets side by side. The differences you find are the exact map of the chaos a buyer would price: steps one does and the other skips, different thresholds, exceptions handled by feel. From there the action is one per month: one process, one page written by whoever runs it, including the exception rule, when it's allowed to leave the flow and who authorizes it. Certified manuals remain a different trade. What's needed here is the page that lets anyone cover Mary's vacation.
Real flexibility
Writing processes down gives people back their true value. Mary stops being irreplaceable for what she remembers and becomes precious again for what she judges: when to deviate from the rule, how to handle the case the page doesn't foresee. Flexibility becomes a conscious choice instead of a permanent necessity. And the company improves: one more piece of its workings lives outside individual heads, so it can be passed down, sold, or simply left alone during a break, while whoever leads uses their head for the work no written page will ever do: designing the future.
At TIPIC we would suggest bringing this question to your next board meeting: if a buyer asked us tomorrow for the company's operating manual, how many pages would we have to hand over? And would those pages match the real company?