Process Alchemy

A new word was created last year and becoming the current expectation of customers.  Enshittification or the gradual degradation of an online platform or service’s functionality.  You introduce a new feature or product and it quickly becomes just a way to make money, with little concern to the customer experience. But why?

We talk a lot about innovation, collaboration, and culture these days — and rightfully so. But there’s one word that’s been quietly disappearing from the modern workplace lexicon: discipline.  Companies are fascinated with the silver bullet and the easy paths to cash.  We have lost the appetite to think critically, to seek out facts, to collect and analyze data, and to make decisions based on evidence — even when it’s uncomfortable, inconvenient, or unpopular.  It’s a muscle that too many teams have stopped flexing. And it’s costing us clarity, accountability, and performance. But more importantly, providing the customer experience that likely motivated us to introduce something in the first place.

At the same time, an aversion to collecting and analyzing data has grown to a become a modern workplace blind spot.  Somewhere along the way, we started confusing speed with progress, and vibes with truth. Gathering real data to understand a situation — whether it’s about performance, process, or customer feedback — started to feel like a “nice to have” instead of a requirement.

The irony? We have more tools, dashboards, and analytics platforms than ever before.  However, these too have become lazy and flawed.  These tools are only as good as the data we collect, and often, that data is messy with poor highly subjective collection, such as agents selecting categories and become a reinforcement of poor decisions.  We continue to lack the discipline to create the strategy needed to get good data that has a purpose and to validate it often.

Why? Because looking at real data requires effort. It forces people to slow down, ask uncomfortable questions, and sometimes admit that what they assumed or wanted to be true… isn’t.

Too often, teams default to gut feeling, groupthink, or whoever speaks with the most confidence in the room.

Sometimes, its not knowing the issue, its simply the lack of resolve and discipline to fix it.  I can’t tell you how many countless and unbelievable horror stories I see from customers attempting to pay a bill but the billing department is so disorganized they can’t properly take a payment!  Glitches that don’t allow customers to get a password to a newly purchased service.  Things that you would think get management to demand an urgency to fix..but instead they begin to ask dumb things like “what can we do to make the customer experience better” when everyone is point out that basic services can’t be done well.  A lack of discipline is missing in understanding and demanding better work.

The Rise of Opinion Management

What’s replaced data-driven discipline is something I’ll call opinion management — a growing tendency in workplaces to manage perception rather than performance.

• Teams spend more time aligning on “messaging” than addressing root problems.
• Leaders prioritize emotional reactions over analytical insights.
• Decisions get made to avoid friction, not to drive results.
• Success is declared before impact is measured.

This isn’t collaboration — it’s appeasement. And over time, it creates a culture where people are more skilled at managing optics than managing outcomes.  People become more focused on being liked, and as that is rewarded, the true skills required to run a business your customers want to do business with is disappearing.

Discipline Is Not Control — It’s Clarity

Let’s redefine what workplace discipline really is:

• It’s the discipline to ask hard questions — not just the ones that make us feel good.
• It’s the discipline to verify before assuming.
• It’s the discipline to build systems that track actual performance, not just how busy people look.
• It’s the discipline to revisit decisions when the data changes — not double down out of ego.

And most importantly, it’s the discipline to hold space for truth, even when it’s messy, complex, or challenges our narrative.

Rebuilding a Culture of Fact-Based Decisions

So how do we bring discipline back?

• Normalize asking for data before acting.
• Reward clarity and insight, not just speed and charisma.
• Build processes that force rigor — in hiring, strategy, and performance management.
• Train teams to distinguish between feeling and fact.
• Encourage intellectual humility — the courage to say “I don’t know, let’s find out.”

This isn’t about slowing things down for the sake of bureaucracy. It’s about creating a workplace that makes better decisions, fewer avoidable mistakes, and more meaningful progress.

Discipline isn’t old-school — it’s a competitive advantage.

In an era of noise, the ability to anchor your organization in truth, data, and clear thinking is what sets high-performing teams apart.

Maribel Topf has over a decade of teaching companies to transform their businesses through operational excellence. Please join https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14445339/ Lean Office Excellence for more stories into creating a culture of operational excellence.