Most operational failures are not failures of design. They are failures of design for repetition. A process that works beautifully once, or twice, or when the founder is standing behind it — and then quietly degrades the moment the founder walks away.
We ask a single question of every system we build: will this survive the hundredth Tuesday? Not the launch. Not the demo. Not the site visit. The hundredth Tuesday, when the person doing it is tired, new, or distracted.
The answer usually requires stripping the process down. Fewer steps. Fewer decisions. Fewer places to guess. The elegance is not in what the design contains; it is in what it refuses to contain.
This is the discipline that separates operations that scale from operations that plateau. It is unglamorous work. It is also the work.
Written by
Angelieque Pelle
Founder of InOrder. Writes on the craft of running things well.