Every organisation has documented processes. And in every organisation, the documented processes diverge from reality. People develop workarounds, shortcuts, and informal systems that are never captured in the official documentation.
These informal processes are not failures — they are adaptations. They represent the organisation's collective intelligence about how to get work done despite the limitations of its formal systems. Understanding them is essential to designing automation that actually works.
This is why we start every engagement with process mapping based on observation and interviews, not documentation review. The gap between how work is supposed to flow and how it actually flows is where the most valuable automation opportunities are found.
Written by
The Orryx advisory team
Orryx is an advisory practice for AI and operational transformation. We work outcome-first and keep a human in the loop — our perspectives come from designing and governing automation in production, not from theory.