Process and Result

“Worked on the report” and “finished the report” describe different results.

Adam Smith opened The Wealth of Nations with the famous pin factory. One worker doing the whole process produced little; splitting the operations sharply increased total output. The story became a symbol of productivity and at the same time a warning that gets read less often: extreme division of labour can make work monotonous and impoverish the person doing it.

That is why a process cannot be judged by the number of items alone. It also produces skills, dependencies, mistakes and a particular type of worker. A good system measures the result and notices what exactly had to be done to a person to turn them into its source.

A process takes time and effort. But what you can use is mostly the finished thing: a signed document, a working program, installed equipment, a sent offer, a decision taken.

A large amount of activity is easy to mistake for productivity. A person takes part in meetings, answers messages, discusses options and looks very busy all day. By evening it turns out that not a single object moved into a new state.

It is worth stating tasks with a verb of result:

Not “work on the presentation,” but:

Prepare and send the presentation for approval.

Not “deal with the supplier,” but:

Get a confirmed price and delivery date.

Not “solve the problem,” but:

Identify the cause of the failure and agree on a temporary measure.

That makes it clear what completion actually means.

But not every job has to produce a final product in a single day. Research, care, management and teaching consist of long processes.

Then it helps to define a completed stage:

• the experiment has been run;
• the hypothesis has been tested;
• the data set has been processed;
• the procedure has been performed;
• an interim decision has been taken.

Completion must not be fictitious. Sending a raw document to tick a box is not the same as finishing the work.

The perfective is not there for reporting. It forces you to see the change in reality that the activity was started for in the first place.

Between the start and the finish you need visible progress — not just growth in a convenient metric, but a change connected to the end function.

Progress lets you see movement: there are fewer errors, the task is done faster, the result is more stable, less help is needed, the difficulty has grown and it has become possible to explain the method to someone else.

This supports learning and helps correct the route.

But the sense of progress can deceive too. A person can improve a convenient metric without getting closer to the goal. The number of pages written grows and the book does not get clearer. The number of meetings increases and the decision stays the same.

So progress should be measured relative to the result.

A good metric:

• is connected to the goal;
• changes before the final result;
• allows a decision to be made;
• resists artificial improvement that brings no real benefit.

Not all advance is linear. A skill may show no visible improvement for a long time and then jump to a new level. A project can temporarily go backwards because a discovered mistake required rework.

Rework does not always mean lost progress. Sometimes it is exactly what proves that the understanding has deepened.

A process can be managed in advance, but the outcome still tests whether the model of the work was sensible.

Before the result you can check:

• the quality of the inputs;
• adherence to the method;
• completion of the stages;
• interim metrics;
• deviations;
• the state of the resources.

If you wait only for the finish, it really will be too late to fix anything.

At the same time a good process does not automatically guarantee a good result. Chance, unknown conditions and a wrong model can destroy conscientious work.

And a bad result does not always mean somebody is at fault.

Still, the outcome is needed to test the process. If a method regularly produces bad results, you cannot defend it forever by the correctness of the procedure.

It helps to separate three levels:

Inputs

What was known and available.

Process

How sensibly and conscientiously people acted.

Result

What happened and what it teaches.

Judging a person by the outcome alone is unfair. A lucky risky decision does not become good because of accidental success. A correct decision under uncertainty can end badly.

But an organisation exists for results, not for the beauty of the process. So both leading and final metrics are needed.

Nor does the process have to be enjoyable at all times. Many valuable goals include boring, unpleasant and difficult stages. A doctor does not have to enjoy every shift, or a writer every edit.

If a whole multi-year process brings nothing but disgust for the sake of a brief moment of result, the choice really is worth reconsidering.

A kitchen settles this distinction physically. At the end of a shift nobody cares how many sauces were started; what matters is how many orders went out to the floor and how many came back. And the intermediate completions there are entirely real: the stock is strained, the vegetables are cut, the station is set up. They show whether you can open at all. The difference between a stage and the appearance of work is that someone accepts a stage — the next person takes it and carries on without redoing it.

Hence an honest test for fictitious completion: name the next recipient. If finished work has no one waiting for it except the reporting system, it is finished only in the reporting system.