There was once a young boy who never quite understood what his father did at work. Every morning, his dad would leave early, dressed in a suit, carrying a briefcase, and the boy would wonder what kept him so busy. He felt like he never saw his father or spent time with him. One day, curious to find out what his dad actually did, the boy decided to follow him.
He sneaked into his father’s office building, hoping to catch a glimpse of what went on behind the closed doors. When he entered his dad’s office, he saw his father sitting at a desk, moving papers from one pile to another. The boy, confused, thought to himself: "This is it? My dad spends all day just shifting papers around?"
Seeing an opportunity, the boy thought he could help. He invented a machine that could move papers from one place to another, thinking that if his dad didn’t have to spend so much time on these menial tasks, he could spend more time with him. The boy proudly showed his invention to his father, who was impressed with the device and took it with him to work the next day. The boy was so sure that in a short while, his father would be much more available and spend time with him.
A few weeks later, the boy overheard a conversation at the dinner table —”we’re letting Jim’s dad go” his father said. Jim was his classmate from school. Jim’s dad worked in the mailroom at the same company. What could this be about? the boy thought. The boy’s father, it turned out, was the CEO of the company. After seeing how much more efficient the paper-moving process could be, he made the call to downsize the mailroom — the very place Jim’s dad worked. The company was “streamlining operations.” Turns out, the boy’s little machine worked a little too well - it just didn’t have the effect he expected it to have.
What started as a heartfelt idea to spend more time with his own father had triggered a chain reaction he never expected. His invention didn’t just move papers — it moved people. Out of jobs, out of routines, out of roles they had quietly held for years. That’s when the boy realized something: improving a process isn’t always just about speed or efficiency. Sometimes, it’s about understanding what — and who — that process actually holds together.
Business processes are the behind-the-scenes engines of every organization — the repeatable steps that turn inputs into valuable outputs. Whether it’s turning raw materials into finished goods, customer inquiries into resolved tickets, or data into decisions, a process is simply how work gets done. These processes are where value is created, and they’re also where margins live or die. If a business can run its processes more effectively — faster, cheaper, or with better outcomes — it opens up room for profit. That’s why understanding and improving processes isn’t just a technical task. It’s a strategic one.
In the past, business processes often functioned like black boxes — you could see what went in and what came out, but not much about what happened in between. Managers knew, for example, that customer complaints came in and resolutions eventually went out, but the exact steps, handoffs, delays, or hidden inefficiencies in the middle were hard to observe without deeply embedded effort. These internal workings were often opaque, shaped by habit, tribal knowledge, or legacy systems. Sometimes they were even protected by culture — people did things “the way Susan taught them,” or because “that’s how it’s always been done.” Like a magician’s trick or the Mad Hatter’s tea party, the process worked well enough, so no one wanted to spoil the illusion. As long as the outputs seemed acceptable, the inputs and everything in between rarely got questioned. But as competition increased and digital tools became more powerful, peeking inside the black box — and rethinking what’s inside — became a business imperative.
But once software entered the scene, that all began to change. Software doesn’t run on vibes — it needs clear instructions. That meant companies had to codify their processes, spell out the steps, and embed them into operational systems. The transfer of tacit knowledge (knowledge gained from personal experience that is more difficult to express) to explicit knowledge (knowledge that is easy to articulate, write down and share) has continued since then. Movements like Business Process Reengineering (BPR) in the 1990s pushed organizations to rethink and formalize how work got done, often using technology as the enabler. Later, the wave of digitalization further locked these processes into systems — automating workflows, routing decisions, and integrating tasks across departments. No economic sector has remained immune to these shifts in how processes are carried out, from agriculture, to education, to transportation, to religion - you name it.
Today, many of those once-human, tacit, semi-informal processes are now wrapped into enterprise software — plug-and-play solutions offered by vendors that promise best practices in a box. From ERP systems to CRM platforms to congregation management software, these tools let organizations onboard fast and scale efficiently. These solutions offer ready-made workflows designed to plug directly into operations. They’re efficient, scalable, and widely adopted — making it easy for companies to get up and running without reinventing the wheel.
As the black boxes of business became easier to open, something else was happening: vendors began boxing them back up — only this time in software code. These systems are built for the average case, not the edge case. They optimize for standardization, not differentiation. And while they’re great for routine tasks, they often fall short when companies face unique challenges, shifting market conditions, or the need to reinvent how they work.
This is one of the reasons many large-scale ERP implementations have struggled or outright failed. The promise was seamless integration and process efficiency — the reality was often bloated budgets, years-long timelines, and a rigid structure that couldn’t flex with business change. Companies found themselves adapting to the software, rather than the other way around. What was meant to free up innovation ended up creating new constraints.
The same pattern played out with digitalization efforts. In the rush to “go digital,” businesses often focused on surface-level tools — customer portals, mobile apps, dashboarding — without rethinking the underlying processes. The result? A digital façade over legacy complexity. And as soon as market conditions changed or customer expectations shifted, these systems couldn’t keep up.
This is the real tension at the heart of plug-and-play business processes: they make it easy to get started, but harder to evolve. And now, with AI entering the picture, organizations are being promised a fresh chance — and fresh pressure — to break out of the box again by enabling AI add ons within existing tools. Salesforce, for example, is pushing hard for its customers to adopt AI-driven features like predictive analytics and automation within their CRM, promising that these tools will help them close deals faster, but also ultimately cajoling organizations to modify their processes to integrate these advanced capabilities. The question is whether organizations will use this moment of AI infusion to rethink how they operate, or simply seek to automate the same old routines in shinier wrappers or port them into new blackboxes.