Processes & Playbooks: the modern take on Procrustes
Myth of Procrustes
The Greek tale of Procrustes serves as a powerful metaphor for the unintended consequences of rigid uniformity. Procrustes—alternately described as robber, troll, or innkeeper—guaranteed travelers a “perfectly fitted” bed. My favorite presents him as innkeeper offering weary travelers, fatigued from climbing the mountain pass, they accepted.
His promise concealed brutality: When guests settled in, the truth emerged: the bed was a torture rack. Those who were too short were stretched to match its length; those who were too tall had their legs cut to size (you have to love the Greek’s). His singular fixation on conformity eclipsed any regard for human variation, and Procrustes was a stickler for conformity.
Thus the phrase Procrustean bed has come to describe any doctrine or methodology that elevates standardization above judgment, even when doing so causes clear and unnecessary harm.
Agile, Design Thinking, Playbooks, & Frameworks are the modern beds we lie in
Agile subscribes to the notion that all work will fit neatly into two sprints—that everything you do, from user research to design concept development to implementation and testing, will fall cleanly into two-week buckets. Design Thinking has its own prescriptive approach: empathy drives insights, which in turn lead to the “right” solution. Every consultant, VC, private equity firm, and self-proclaimed expert has a playbook for enhancing a company’s value. Whether the goal is gaining market share or executing a well-timed IPO or acquisition, each exit strategy is some mix of operational enhancements—often focused on cash management and talent management—balanced with growth initiatives.
Regardless of where you find yourself, it’s important to remember that while these processes can return great value, their blind application to every situation will produce predictable—and likely mediocre—outcomes. Each is, in fact, a type of Procrustean bed: they require the people implementing them to ignore the variances inherent in every product or business and to force everything to fit within a predetermined scope. At some point they all require you to “cut your losses” and simply move on, having extracted whatever value you could from the resources available in the time you allotted.
It’s a red flag when someone tells me they’ve used the same approach on dozens of products or across dozens of companies, so it will work here as well. I don’t take repetition as a de facto sign of success; I look at outcomes—not just financial outcomes but holistic ones. What happened to customers, employees, investors, the environment, and society?
Real success requires an understanding of the landscape and the inherent potential within an organization or product. It requires the ability to deliver value across the board, not just into one set of stakeholders’ pockets. It requires vision, faith, and the ability to inspire. Simply rolling out a predefined plan and force-fitting customers, talent, technology, and the product portfolio into allocated spaces—stretching them when they’re thin or trimming them when they’re too large—is naive or arrogant. Or worse, it’s an action taken out of habit, simply because it’s familiar.
No process is without shortcomings. And every process has room for improvement.
