Processes & Playbooks: the modern take on Procrustes

Myth of Procrustes

Procrustes was an innkeeper with a guarantee. Weary travelers climbing the mountain pass could rest easy — he offered a perfectly fitted bed. It was an offer too good to refuse.

The catch revealed itself once they settled in. The bed was a torture rack. Too short? You'd be stretched to fit. Too tall? Your legs would be trimmed to size. Procrustes had no interest in the person. Only in the fit.

The Greeks gave us the word Procrustean to describe any doctrine that elevates standardization above judgment — that forces the problem to conform to the solution, rather than the other way around. It's a word we don't use nearly enough.

We've built a lot of Procrustean beds.

The modern beds we lie in

Agile assumes all work fits neatly into two-week sprints — that user research, concept development, implementation, and testing will fall cleanly into identical buckets, regardless of what's actually being built. Design Thinking has its own prescribed arc: empathy generates insight, insight generates the right solution, the right solution ships. Every consultant, VC, and private equity firm has a playbook; they are all some mix of operational tightening and growth initiatives, tuned for a well-timed exit or IPO. Different beds, same rack.

None of this is inherently wrong. These frameworks exist because they've worked — in certain contexts, for certain problems, with certain teams. The danger isn't the framework. It's the blind application of it. When someone tells me they've used the same approach across dozens of products and dozens of companies, I don't hear confidence. I hear habit. Repetition is not evidence of success. Outcomes are — and not just financial ones. What happened to the customers? The employees? And most importantly the people the product was supposed to help?

Real value requires reading the actual landscape, not overlaying a predetermined map onto it. It requires understanding what's genuinely possible inside a specific organization, with specific people, at a specific moment. It requires the judgment to know when a process is serving the work — and the honesty to recognize when the work is being trimmed to serve the process.

Stretching what's thin and cutting what doesn't fit isn't rigor. It's just a more sophisticated way of avoiding the harder questions.

Every process has shortcomings. Every process has room for improvement. The ones worth using know it.