Process Warriors and Civil Disobedients

Back in the early 2000s, part of my duties as a fighter pilot included “sitting alert” at an air sovereignty alert (ASA) facility built at the end of the runway at an Air Force base. 

At the operational level, the ASA mission consists of pilots and ground crews eating, napping, working out and sleeping in the alert facility in 24 hour shifts while waiting for the klaxon to unexpectedly blast through the alert shack’s loudspeakers, scaring the bejeezus out of everyone in the place. 

When the klaxon goes off, pilots, along with their crew chiefs, sprint to the jets, fire them up, and then blast off, at supersonic speeds when the situation dictates, to the scene of whatever airborne event requires their attention.   

Sitting alert truly epitomizes the phrase “hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.” 

The hours of boredom vastly outnumbered the moments of terror during my ASA career. I would typically report to the facility with good intentions to do something productive, but invariably I would while away those hours napping, eating, and surfing the pre-YouTube internet. 

One day, I fell into a JRR Tolkien rabbit hole. Years before, I had read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy and I had just recently watched The Return of the King, the final of Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of the trilogy. With the movie fresh in my mind, I did a search for “who was Gimli’s dad?” or some such. Hours later, I was considering buying a copy of The Silmarillion to enhance my growing knowledge of the origins of Middle Earth. 

And then I snapped out of it.

The genius of a writer like Tolkien (or George Lucas with Star Wars or George RR Martin with A Song of Fire and Ice, et al) is his ability to create an expansive fictional universe. It’s possible to spend a lifetime immersed in this universe and never get to the bottom of it. 

I will never be a Tolkien scholar or even a Tolkien nerd on a Middle Earth fan wiki, so any hours I put into learning about Legolas’s family tree would be useless other than as entertainment. Entertainment is fine—I’m a big fan in general—but unless you’re paid to be an entertainer, there are only so many hours you can devote to it before it crowds out the hours that you need to be productive.  

Being an expert on a fictional universe can be cool, but ultimately for most of us, it’s also completely worthless. “Fictional” and all that…

In the real world, many organizations are built upon fictional universes that consist of byzantine sets of rules and processes that have collected over time. Someone, somewhere along the line created processes that probably had value at the time. Now, the whole organization still follows them but the only person who knows why is Thror, the Heir of Durin, and he was slain by the Azog the Orc sometime in the Third Age.

When faced with an organizational fictional universe, there are two dominant, archetypal personalities:

1. The Process Warrior: The process warrior leans hard into the fictional universe in order to be the helpful resident expert. The Process Warrior values following the letter of the law and enjoys knowing all the laws. The company memo states that TPS reports will have a cover sheet, so therefore, he ensures fellow employees create them. 

Whether the cover sheet or the TPS report provide value is of no consequence to him. All that matters is that the process is followed. 

2. The Civil Disobedient: The CD looks at a process and performs a risk-benefit calculation:

   a. Does this process provide value?

   b. Is this process a waste of my time?

   c. How much grief will I get from the Process Warriors if I ignore it?

   d. Will anyone get hurt if I ignore it? (hopefully this is part of the calculation!)

If the calculation fails to meet his threshold, he simply ignores the rule. The longer he does this, the more his coworkers will ignore it too because they don’t want to be the only suckers expending effort on it. Eventually there will be a company-sanctioned process on the books that no one cares about except for a couple of angry PWs. 

PWs are good because they promote standardization and they keep the organization out of trouble with outside agencies by making sure rules are followed. You need these people.

CDs are good because they think creatively. They promote innovation by questioning why things are done the way they are. You need these people. 

However…

PWs at their worst are morale sucking automatons like Lumbergh from Office Space. 

CDs at their worst are organizational anarchists like pretty much everyone else in Office Space.

The key to getting the most out of your PWs and CDs is to promote a culture of constant improvement through debriefing. Debriefing forces you to make decisions on what works, what doesn’t, and what used to work, but is no longer valuable. 

Because your processes are valuable (and not stupid), CDs don’t mind following them. They know that if one becomes obsolete, they have an avenue to change it. PWs are happy because the written rules are in synch with what makes sense in the real world and what people are happy to do anyway. Everyone wins. 

Well-structured, professional debriefings can help you ditch the fictional universe and succeed in the real world.