In today’s business landscape, the buzz around automation and AI is deafening. Companies are racing to implement the latest technologies, promising increased efficiency and reduced costs. Yet, in this rush toward digital transformation, we’ve overlooked something crucial: the context and strategy behind our processes.
The Missing Ingredient: Human Judgment
Automation is powerful, but without strategic context, it’s merely speed without direction. We’ve all experienced the frustration of a system that efficiently performs the wrong task or solves a problem that isn’t the real bottleneck.
As Einstein allegedly said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Yet, ironically, in technology, we’ve normalized this exact behavior. How many times have you been told to “just restart it” when facing a technical issue? This common tech support advice is actually an admission of a fundamental flaw in our approach to system design.
The Cost of Context-Free Solutions
When we implement workflows without understanding the full context:
- We optimize for efficiency rather than effectiveness
- We automate broken processes, magnifying their flaws
- We lose sight of the ultimate business objectives
- We create systems that lack the adaptability of human judgment
A financial services client recently shared how they automated their customer onboarding process, reducing processing time by 70%. Impressive on paper—until they realized the automated system was creating a bottleneck at the verification stage, resulting in higher abandonment rates.
Injecting Common Sense into Design
The human element in workflow design isn’t a limitation to overcome but an essential feature to preserve. Here’s how to bring context back into your process design:
Start with why, not how. Before designing a workflow, understand the business context. What problem are we truly solving? What outcomes matter most?
Map the human journey. Document the full experience of everyone involved in a process—not just the system steps but the cognitive and emotional journey.
Incorporate exception handling. The most valuable aspect of human involvement is often handling exceptions. Design systems that leverage automation for routine cases but seamlessly involve humans for complex situations.
Build feedback loops. Great workflows evolve. Design mechanisms to continuously capture insights from users and customers.
The Competitive Advantage of Contextual Design
While competitors focus on automating everything possible, the real competitive advantage lies in identifying what should be automated and what requires human judgment. This strategic discernment creates systems that are not only efficient but effective—delivering what humans actually need, not just what technology can provide.
In a world overwhelmed by technical capabilities, the most successful organizations will be those that recognize that technology serves human needs, not the other way around. They’ll design workflows that harness the best of both automation and human insight.
After all, the goal isn’t to remove humans from the equation but to elevate their contributions to where they matter the most.