Nobody sits down and designs a bad process. Processes become bad the way a path becomes a rut: one reasonable decision at a time, none of which looked like a problem on the day.
An extra approval is added after a costly mistake. A checking step appears because an upstream system was unreliable that quarter. A spreadsheet is introduced to bridge a gap during a migration that finished three years ago. Each change was justified. None was ever reviewed.
Why drift is hard to see from inside
Because it is gradual, and because the people closest to it adapted with it. Ask a team to describe their process and they will describe it accurately , as it is today. The comparison that would reveal the drift is against how it ran three years ago, and nobody has that.
The documented procedure is no help either. It usually describes the original design, which is precisely the version nobody follows.
The signals worth watching
- Steps whose purpose nobody can explain. "We have always checked that" is the clearest single indicator of accumulated drift.
- Approvals that have never rejected anything. A control that has never fired in two years is either unnecessary or not being applied.
- Growing variance. The same task taking wildly different times depending on who does it means the process has become interpretation rather than procedure.
- Rising exception volume. When the exception path is busier than the standard path, the standard path is wrong.
What to do about it
Measure it. Not comprehensively, and not forever , but establish a baseline for the handful of processes that carry real commercial weight, and revisit it annually. Cycle time, touch count, handoffs and rework rate are enough for most operations.
You cannot detect drift without a fixed point. The baseline is the fixed point, which is why we take it before we change anything.
The businesses that stay efficient are not the ones that designed a perfect process. They are the ones that check, periodically, whether the process they are running is still the one they think they are running.