Plea against SOPs
Last evening, I found myself thinking about SOPs. How SOPs become the means to any end! I hate it when it happens around me, I won’t mince my words here .
For the uninitiated, SOP stands for Standard Operating Procedure. It’s an articulation of well defined inputs, associated decisions & actions to complete a particular task in a repeatable manner.
That’s that. When you have so much certainty in the inputs, decisions & expected outcomes (completing a task), then you may be in the SOP phase. Articulate the best SOP, teach it to all involved and do the ‘task’ at scale with very little variation or confusion.
But anywhere else, it can be a dangerous tool. There is a lot of weight in each word behind this acronym — SOP. We tend to ignore that and thus face this risk. Let me elaborate it a bit:
Standard: expects that there is a well defined & accepted mechanism — 1) inputs are well know and easy to identify, 2) all decisions carry high confidence, 3) steps to complete the task are unique and 4) output is easily measured & well defined.
Operating: expects that there is a clear & definite relation between input, efforts and output. If this is not certain, it’s not an operation. A machine ‘operates’, an artist does not.
Procedure: expects that there is a well defined path from state a (inputs) to state b (output). The beauty of a procedure is that we know it in advance and thus have built confidence in the input output equation. Procedure promises an output as long as the input remains the same.
If any of these ingredients are missing, then we may not get any real meaningful benefits of SOPs. It may, in fact, can cause adverse risks to the core idea itself. When SOP becomes the magic tool, we tend to paint every picture with this. I worry about that situation. It becomes an idea killer.
A new idea needs its own journey that is built on trial & error. There is romance in the journey of getting from “not knowing how to do it” to “having a sure shot way to do it”. It’s filled with surprises and learning. Without those, SOPs are mere imposition of our limited knowledge on that notion.
There will be some missions (tasks, ideas, ritual) that may not have an SOP ever. That’s their inherent nature. It’s how they become special. You cannot have SOP for showing empathy, inspiring, or even abusing. You cannot have SOPs for drawing a beautiful picture, capturing a great candid shot, singing with your heart, making someone smile and many more such pleasures of life. They need different ingredients. There can be some recipe that makes the chances of desired output high, but there is no certainty.
But it’s not that only ‘experiential’ and ‘emotional’ things cannot have SOPs. Even those that tend to have operational nature may not have SOPs. Especially in their infancy. The definiteness of an operational task comes from trial-and-error and iterative experimentations. Let those happen, with an open yet a highly observing & diligent mind. Note down — what works and what does not. What’s easy to explain & do, what requires a lot of training. So on and so forth. And you will reach a stage when you have built confidence in your input — output equation. A team with passion for high quality in execution will take this path. For everyone else, SOPs are the hammer and any problem is a nail.
