Result or Process?

I saw a quote written on a whiteboard few days back let me talk about this subject again. The quote said something like (I cannot remember this 100%, but meaning is not altered), “If you focus on change, you will achieve results”. To be honest, I do not know who said this and why this was put on the board. But I was immediately turned to one of my older posts on the main site called “Results Vs Process”. I do not believe change will bring results, but if the results want change that’s fine. But for long term sustainability and the repeatability of the results, you need processes.

When you have a process, which is making you positive outcomes, you can fine tune them to achieve even better outcomes. But when you just focus on the results, you will just look at the end goal and will miss the big picture, and why you want to achieve these results in the first place. Specially, when you are presented with the same problem again, you will have to start all over again.

This is where the process comes to play.  In our day to day life, we get the repeated challenges. If you are a customer care representative, sitting in a call center, you will have same set of problems every day, in different words. This is same with the manufacturing, other services or even in offices.

I am in 100% agreement, we need results. But how we achieve those results determines the quality of the result. Solving problems needs proper mechanisms, not only to solve the problem, but to guide and capture the process of problem solving. This will create a system or a process which you can apply over and over again to solve the problems. When problems are solved systematically, you can use the learning in the future.

Results Or Processes, what do you think? Leave your comments.