I wish this were a fairy tale, but alas it is not.
Imagine a world where process is king. Where process has ruled for 100’s of years. Where process and its princes have successfully subordinated outcome to indentured servitude status. Where even the most faulty outcomes are acceptable provided King Process has been obeyed.
So that your imagination might be enriched, let us put King Process on a throne. And not just any throne, but one made of heavy granite blocks, quarried from the nearby hills and plains. The blocks, all of the same texture, size, and color, are immovable and allow King Process to sit high above the multitude, always a reminder that process was to be obeyed above all else.
Blood lines being what they are, Kings would come and go but they were always of the same deportment and ego: They were raised to know (or, at least believe) that once ascended to the throne, their world of process would reign supreme. Damn the outcome! Off with its head! Outcome is beneath us!
Occasionally, there would ascend to the throne a King Process who understood that 
outcomes were not dispensable, or at least not as discardable as previous Kings had treated them. We might look upon these Kings as enlightened, having witnessed a need for change and for the outcomes that supported that change. These Kings might have seen previous Kings of Process as being too much the anchor and not enough the engine. After all, the rabble of students and staff and other plebeians could be seen as wanting an outcome of eventual value to the throne. The enlightened kings would first attempt to have some granite removed from the throne, in order to lower it closer to the undulating masses. But the stones, the building blocks of process, could not be removed without weakening the throne for future kings.
Don’t lower the bridge; raise the river!
So they decided to raise the status of the plebeians. Not too high, mind you, but just enough to quiet the militant rants and to make them easier to hear. The king would insist that the plebes follow a process that fed into their process – process upon process, subordinate process uploaded into the superior process – and only then would the king accept the outcome of the now-raised status of the rabble. Parenthetically, the outcome would now become the King’s outcome; it was his idea all along, you see.
Process upon process. And the “franchise” awarded by the king to the plebes could be revoked at any time, especially should the kingly process not be honored. “We will allow you to rock the boat, dear Plebes,” the Kings of Process would say, “but do not think we will allow you to topple the King of Process.”
Sound familiar? It should. We encounter it all the time. Think of a time when you have wanted to challenge a status quo (we therapists call it homeostasis) only to be rebuffed and told to follow a process. Your response might have been, quite justifiably by the way, “but it was the process that got us here!” In point of fact, you were wanting to challenge the process, only you saw it terms of the outcome, the product of the process.
Recently I was asked to address an outcome – indeed, to create an outcome – only to have my attempts rebuffed by the Kings of Process. I approached it by naively assuming I was at the same intellectual level of the Kings, and proceeded to work toward the outcome, the product if you will, thinking, “how could anyone object to such a wonderful product?”
Ah, but since I had presumed to be an equal, to have the same degree of vision and oversight as those atop the Throne of Process, I was to be disabused of such pretense. In Australia they call it the Tallest Poppy Syndrome. I was, in effect, a poppy that was about to grow too tall, and I was to be cut down. They tried to wield their hedge-cutters, their scissors, to whack me back down to size.
They failed.
Think of your own organization. Have you allowed a Royalty of Process to reign supreme? Is yours a land where all the poppies, except those in charge, are of the same or similar height? Do you permit some to wield weed-whackers of their own egos and cut the ascendant down to size? Self-reflection time, children: Do you yourself whack people down to size?
To grow any organization is to fertilize a field of poppies any one of which might grow taller than the others. To whack the tallest poppy is to ensure a field of mediocrity and inaction. The wielding of scissors is bullying, pure and simple.
Those who can, do; Those who cannot, bully.
Think about it.
