Second rule for building an operations machine.
Map everything.
A process that isn’t mapped doesn’t exist. Not for the system. It exists in somebody’s head, and heads go on holiday, get sick, quit.
I resisted this for a long time. Mapping felt bureaucratic. Flowcharts. Documents nobody reads. The kind of thing large companies do instead of working.
Then I watched what happens without it. Every unmapped process is handled “the way we always do it”, which means five different ways by five different people, none of them written down. When something goes wrong, there is no way to find out which step failed, because nobody agreed on the steps.
Think of a kitchen. A good restaurant doesn’t have talented cooks improvising. It has a line. Every dish has a sequence, every station knows its part, and a new cook can plate the same dish on day one. Talent goes into the recipe once. Then the line repeats it a thousand times.
Mapping is not documentation. It’s the act of deciding, once, how something is done. The document is just the receipt.
And it has a brutal side effect. When you try to map a process, you often discover it isn’t one. It’s three exceptions and a habit. That’s the moment you find out what you’re actually running.
Map all of it. The boring ones, the rare ones, the ones only one person knows. Especially those.
If it isn’t on the map, the system can’t run it. Someone will, in their own way, until they don’t.
