Do Not Automate the Extra Steps

When a process is painful, people invent a way around it. They copy data between two systems by hand. They keep a side list. They add a manual check because the automated one cannot be trusted. These extra steps are acts of quiet competence, and they keep the business moving.

The danger comes later, when someone finally decides to make things more efficient. The obvious target is the manual, repetitive step, so that is what gets automated. It feels like progress. It is often the opposite.

Automating an extra step takes something that was at least visible and human, and casts it in concrete. The underlying problem, the reason the step existed at all, is now buried one layer deeper and harder to question. You have made the symptom faster and the cause permanent.

An extra step is a message from the people closest to the work. It says: the real system does not do what we actually need here. That message is far more valuable than the manual task itself.

So before automating anything, ask what the extra step is making up for. Two systems that do not talk. A rule that does not fit reality. A step that exists only because an earlier decision was never revisited. Fix that, and the extra work often disappears on its own.

Speed applied to the wrong thing just gets you to the wrong place faster. The opportunity is almost never the extra step. It is whatever forced that step into existence.