Workflow

Overview

What workflow readiness asks

• Workflow readiness asks whether the cognitive shape of the work has been mapped in enough detail to redesign it. Most organisations believe they know how their workflows run, then discover, on examination, that what they know is an idealised version of the work rather than the one anyone actually performs. The gap most often shows up at the points where AI would have the greatest impact.
• Those are the points where the official process is least reliable as a description: the judgement-heavy moments, the escalations, the workarounds that absorb the edge cases the process pretends do not exist. Closing the workflow-readiness gap is rarely a technology investment; it is the act of producing a workflow map (cognition-mode or specification-mode depending on the pattern) that the team recognises as accurate.
• The triangulation discipline (interviews, observation and documentation review) is the standard practice, and the disagreement among the three is itself informative. Until a workflow has been mapped in this way, pattern allocation is a guess. Workflow readiness is the dimension Cognitive Partnership and Discrete Delegation depend on most heavily; Agency and Utility need it too, but lean more on the data and technical dimensions than the human-in-the-loop patterns do.