Unless an organization is in start-up mode, it’s unreasonable to expect new talent to welcome a trial-by-fire onboarding experience. At some point, every organization - large or small - has to stop performing like a start-up in eternal chaos and start performing as a mature organization with mature workflows, mature SOPs, and established continuous improvement efforts.

As you lie in your hospital bed, groggy and groaning post-surgery, your phone blows up with texts from the untrained person. Questions ping in, one after the other in a barrage so relentless a nurse peeks in to ask if you’re good. Meanwhile, your frantic co-worker is waiting for answers to questions like:

• 12:41pm How do the boarding requests come in? Outlook email? If email, what is address? How to access email? How to prioritize requests - first in, first out? Who sends email requests? Do senders get an auto-reply stating the request is being scheduled? How to differentiate between a new request and a follow-up?

Learning how to run faster at age 65 carries some freaking difficult mental walls. For me, the most insidious wall is the phrase I’m too old. Crafty and evil, the phrase whispers, “Self-improvement is for the young. Go home and live vicariously through Golden Girls.” More than one guided training run has found me sobbing against the wily whisperer’s lie.

Paper. Post-its. Pens. These tools are all you need to jumpstart the creative process of mapping a workflow. They’re old-school simple, set an expectation of play, and allow participants to be physically engaged in both memorializing and solving the puzzle of their workflow.

Workflow documenting, aka mapping, can appear overwhelming if you’ve never done it before. How do you differentiate between a workflow and a procedure? And with multiple departments and teams performing multiple categories of work, how do you determine which workflows to map first? Here are 8 simple steps to determine which workflow to map first.

Workflow mapping is the act of transferring internal operations knowledge out of employee heads, memorializing it, and saving it in a shared location. Mapping can uncover duplication of effort, identify interrelated tasks and areas that can benefit from shared resources, and reveal how key data points move through the workflow.

During a webinar yesterday, a presenter stated, “AI won’t take your job, but someone who knows AI better just might.” It’s the type of statement that can elicit a crazed urgent-urgency to go all-in with GenAI, or other artificial intelligence, before steady preparation has concluded.

AI Influencers are non-IT stakeholders who recognize the game-changing promise of GenAI. And understanding the big picture of a GenAI implementation project primes an AI Influencer to become a well-informed — and respected — change champion.

An AI education program produced by your organization can consolidate the burdensome amount of information available, tie it to organizational mission and values, and package it into a fun, interactive education event — maybe even with some AI karaoke.

When considering an investment in Artificial Intelligence (AI), you may want to review the current state of quality checks (QCs) in your organization’s workflows and create a QC Status document. The completed document can be uploaded to an enterprise AI tool and prompted to generate QC insights.

Human limitation is a starting point, not an ending. Creating a culture that views human limitation as an existing asset, while providing AI education and training to employees, can pave the way for employees who are ready to engage in super-suit-thinking and innovation.

Decision makers can’t make decisions to invest in GenAI based on vague descriptions of the current state of internal operations. And, without a precise understanding of the current state, strategic opportunities and business needs can be missed during the assessment phase.

Every employee has a belief about what the future looks like when science fiction is no longer fiction. Decades-long exposure to doomsday themes of many science fiction movies and literature have contributed to a wary stance. How can organizations address this distrust?

Each Task Force member can provide the unique knowledge, insight, and perspective of their roles to guide the drafting of an AI Governance Policy.

As you consider how your business can use AI tools to create efficiencies in workflows and SOPs, it’s important to remember this: humans must always be in the loop to ensure the final results align with business policies and objectives and haven’t violated any laws.

It’s common to MacGyver things together to make a process work. While a MacGyvered process — using what you have on hand to make things work — can be ingenious, it can also present a quality challenge for a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) muddied by the ingenuity.

I am convinced these types of breach-of-trust scenarios occur in offsite work spaces all over the United States multiple times every day, and they reveal a new dimension for workflow considerations: work location confidentiality risk.