RIP, SOPs
Why we need to ditch 20th-Century thinking and find a 21st-Century approach to process
My grandmother worked in a button factory in the mid 1950s, out in the rolling hills of rural Tennessee somewhere between Nashville and Knoxville. She worked in the button molding station, so after the raw materials had been sorted, they’d arrive at my grandmother’s manual press and she would use it to mold the plastic into whatever size and shape button they were making that day.
And that’s what she did—every day, all day—for years, until my uncle was born in 1957.
Seventy years later, her granddaughter (that’s me) works in a completely different reality.
My equipment? A laptop and a phone.
My deliverables? Mostly ideas and information, not physical goods.
My environment? Digital, fast-moving, and always changing.
I know that’s not everyone’s experience—there are still plenty of folks using machines, driving forklifts, making sandwiches on assembly lines—but this shift to knowledge work is no longer fringe. It’s mainstream.
And there’s one critical difference between my work and my grandmother’s that applies to all of us: The rate of change.
Even though I have some repeatable processes I follow, even those change frequently. Right now, for example, we’re incorporating a new AI tool that’s turned our old proven process on its head. And I’m definitely not doing the same task over and over again like my grandmother did. Sometimes I wish I could, don’t you? Give my brain a break.
But I can’t work that way unless I want to be obsolete tomorrow. Why? Things change too fast.
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The Problem With SOP Thinking
So let’s talk about process.
The problem is that in many ways, as business leaders—the people responsible for deciding on the work that needs to be done, and delegating that work to our teams—we’ve inherited an approach to process from our grandparents. Or in my case, my grandparents’ bosses:
It sounds like this:
Standardize everything
Write detailed SOPs
Repeat for years
That worked well for its time. But what worked then doesn’t always work now.
The process theories that worked so well, that were innovative for their time…don't get quite the same outcome now 70 years later.
First we got Lean, which showed us how to reduce waste.
Then we got Six Sigma, which taught us how to improve quality.
Most recently we got Scrum, which helped us manage complexity at sprint speed.
All of those were innovative in their time. But if you’re running a 21st-century business with a fast-moving team and a shifting product, they’re no longer enough—at least not on their own.
Why?
Because they assume stability.
And we now live in a world of constant change.
Let’s redefine process
Process is how we communicate the what and the how of work. What needs to be done, and how to do it.
But the way we communicate has changed, and so have the dynamics around that communication. We’re now contending with:
Information overload – more data, tools, and noise than ever
New cultural norms – flatter org charts, shorter tenures, hybrid teams
Faster rates of change – everything is evolving, all the time
So what must we change to adapt to a modern world? It’s not more SOPs.
Today, we need:
Frameworks for decision-making
Access to a single source of truth
A modern mechanism for driving change
Frameworks for decision-making
To combat Information Overload, you need fewer SOPs, and more frameworks for decision-making.
In the 1950s, my grandmother didn’t make many decisions at work. That was the point: show up, do the job exactly as instructed, clock out. That’s just how things were.
That doesn’t work anymore.
Today, we need people who can think. We want problem-solvers and decision-makers. We want employees who don’t just follow instructions—they understand context, use judgment, and adapt in real time.
That’s especially true in businesses like mine—and probably yours—where we’re not selling widgets. We’re selling expertise, services, and experiences.
Which means our inventory isn’t physical. Our inventory is our intellectual capital.
If you owned a Best Buy, you would never let an employee walk out the door with 200 TVs. But we do that all the time in expertise- or experience-based companies when we let our people walk off with everything they learned…
If you want to retain your company’s value in the 21st century, you need to capture your team’s thinking, not just their task lists.
So instead of rigid SOPs, give your team frameworks:
3 questions to ask before making a client recommendation
4 pillars of our “white glove” customer experience
The decision tree for when to escalate vs when to own it
That’s how you scale thinking—without turning people into robots.
To combat information overload, we need more simple frameworks for decision-making.
Access to a single source of truth
Second—To adapt to new cultural norms, you need fewer SOPs, and more access to a single source of truth.
In my first job out of college in 2005, we had a binder at the front desk. And it worked fine back then, but it wouldn’t work as well now. Even if you are full time in the office, everyone working from the same schedule, the content of that binder would be constantly in flux. It would be a waste of time to edit and reprint it every time something changed.
But 20 years later we have much better options to help us adapt to different cultural norms.
Your team needs access to a single source of truth that:
Broadcasts updates instantly
Tracks who has seen or learned what
Is available 24/7, from anywhere
That could be your internal wiki, your training platform, or your process documentation hub.
But it’s not a static document. It’s a living system. If it doesn’t live where your team works, it will die on a digital shelf.
A modern mechanism for driving change
Finally—To leverage the rate of change, you need fewer SOPs and you need a modern mechanism for driving change.
They say we’re in the middle of the biggest wealth transfer the world has ever seen, and it hasn’t peaked yet—$100 trillion in the next decade.
We’re also in the middle of a massive knowledge transfer.
Gone are the days when tribal knowledge got passed down through apprenticeships or hallway conversations. So what do we do?
We don’t knowledge share to a person. We knowledge share to a system.
Think about Wikipedia. Why does it exist? Because information changes too fast. If you were in the business of printing encyclopedias and you wanted the most up to date, verified information, you wouldn’t last long.
The value of Wikipedia isn’t in the words on the webpages…the value is in the mechanism, or the system, that ensures a large group of people are regularly contributing and verifying what’s there. The information itself is almost irrelevant. What is relevant is that we have a way to memorialize important information that works in the 21st Century.
In fast-changing environments, the value isn’t in the “perfect” documentation. It’s in the system that allows you to keep pace with change.
Your business needs the same.
Do process differently. Build for change.
Let me speak directly to the founders and entrepreneurs reading this. What I want you to take away is that everything you’ve learned about process might be a good foundation, but it’s not enough for the 21st Century.
Because I know that so many of you fall into one of these extremes:
Labor over long, detailed SOPs that will never be used, or
Understand deep down it’s a waste of time, so you do nothing at all.
Neither extreme is working.
People still need:
Context (what’s important and why)
Steps to get it done
What “done” looks like
But today, they also need:
Simple frameworks for sound decision-making
Access to a single source of truth
A modern mechanism for driving change
That’s the new playbook.
It’s lighter. It’s faster. It’s dynamic.
And it works.
