I’ve spent years watching smart people get trapped by systems that don’t work for them.
A quality control team skips a critical step because nobody explained why it exists. A manufacturing leader avoids process improvement because she’s seen it weaponised as “red tape” in previous roles. A team creates elaborate workarounds instead of fixing the underlying workflow. A business owner resists automation because she’s afraid it’ll distance her from what actually happens on the shop floor.
These aren’t failures of people. They’re failures of systems design.
The Real Problem with Process
There’s a persistent myth in smaller companies: process and entrepreneurialism are enemies. You either have rigid, suffocating systems that kill creativity, or you have the agility and responsiveness that lets SMEs survive and grow. You can’t have both.
I don’t believe that’s true.
People are fundamentally creatures of habit. We thrive with structure, clarity, and shared understanding of how things work. But the *amount* of structure we need changes with circumstances. The real skill isn’t choosing between process and creativity. It’s finding the calibration that works for your people and your business.
When there’s no shared way of working, I’ve seen firsthand what happens: growth stalls, creativity gets buried in firefighting, and people feel disempowered because they’re never quite sure what’s expected or why decisions are made the way they are.
Good process doesn’t constrain entrepreneurialism. It enables it. It gives people the clarity and confidence to do their best work, and it frees leaders to focus on strategy instead of constantly solving the same problems.
What I Actually Do
I help SME leaders and their teams design and implement systems that work *for* people, not against them. That means:
- Process Design: Understanding how work actually flows, where friction exists, and how to redesign workflows so they’re clear, efficient, and human-centred.
- Automation: Identifying where automation adds real value. Not just speed, but also consistency, reliability, and the chance for people to focus on higher-value work.
- AI and Technology: Demystifying emerging tools and helping you understand where they genuinely solve problems versus where they create new ones. Technology should serve your strategy, not drive it.
- Quality Systems: Building frameworks that embed good practice into how you work, without becoming bureaucratic or disconnected from reality.
What Ties It Together
I’ve worked across quality management, IT systems, and operational workflows. I’ve seen how these domains intersect. How a poorly designed IT system can undermine a quality framework, or how automation without process clarity creates chaos.
But more importantly, I’ve learned that every system, whether it’s a quality standard, an automated workflow, or an AI implementation, ultimately succeeds or fails based on whether it respects the people using it and the people it’s designed to serve.
That’s the lens I bring to everything I do. It’s why I write about process improvement, automation, and AI not as abstract concepts, but as practical challenges that real businesses face. And it’s why I’m focused on helping you navigate these challenges in ways that actually work for your context – not some generic playbook.
If you’re wrestling with how to improve operations without losing the agility that’s kept you competitive, or if you’re trying to figure out where automation or AI actually fits into your strategy, that’s the conversation I’m here to have.