Three-Step Process Documenter™

A leadership team names its core processes first, then hands each one to the seat that owns it. The owner lists the major steps, usually between six and a dozen, writes a few bullets under each and stops there. EOS then asks for the harder part, which is getting everybody onto the same version and keeping them there.

Documentation projects usually die of ambition. A team sets out to capture everything, produces four hundred pages nobody opens, and concludes that writing things down does not work here. Capping the detail at the major steps makes the job finishable inside a quarter, and a page somebody reads beats a manual that nobody does.

Worked example: A freight brokerage documented its claims process in eleven steps across two pages. Writing it took a morning. The useful discovery was step seven, where the file passed to accounts, which two people did by email and one did by leaving a note on a desk. Naming that step ended a recurring argument about lost paperwork.

Sources: Traction, Gino Wickman, chapter on Process; eosworldwide.com/eos-tools