A process is just a path from inputs to outputs. The speaker uses a printer, baking a cake, and pottery to show how processes work in business and everyday life, treating them as habits or ways of doing things to get results.
So somewhere along the line, someone has mentioned to you the idea of business systems, processes, SOPs. And you're taking in all these buzzwords and all of a sudden you think to yourself, wait, what is a process? Yeah, that's a pretty common place to be at when you're starting to explore the world of business system stuff. Because there is an endless amount of jargon that we keep using to define the same things, fancier and fancier terms. In this video, I want to break down all what is a process? And what are some synonyms we can use to remember the meaning of process so we can start to identify them in our day to day lives, in our normal day to day work. To explain process. I feel like one of the easiest ways to do so would be to look at something like this. This is a printer, or at least a GIF of a printer. And with this printer, we have two defined sides. We have the input of paper, electricity, a human putting that paper and plugging in that electricity. And then we have the output. The output in this case is printed paper. Right. Whatever we have, it is now printed. This machine right here that we see on the screen is turning an input into an output. And what is it that we can call this machine? Well, if we wanted to be literal, we could call this a printer, which you would be correct. We could also call it a machine, which would also be correct. But if we take a step back and go a bit theoretical, we. We could call this machine, this thing that's turning inputs into outputs, a process. Process is just a path to a defined result. When you turn one thing into another thing that you've defined that journey between there of turning paper into printed paper, of turning ingredients into a cake, that is a process. One thing that I want to highlight for you about this definition of process is, is that the key things we need to have are a defined result. We need to know where we're trying to get and we need to try to get there. We need to actually do things to get there. There is no requirement here that says this path needs to be perfect. It needs to be the straightest path, the most efficient path, the nothing like that. Ooh. And if any of this feels a bit confusing, I do have a bonus training below this video that goes through all of this in a bit more detail. So check that out if you're feeling a bit stuck. Stuck. All right, back to the video. To have a process, we just need to have a path and a known destination. The reason I want to highlight that is because so Many times I hear people who are new to the process world view process as this other, this thing that some people can have. But I could never realistically achieve process in my business. But the fact is you already have a process. All of us as human beings are quite processed, driven. And all I mean by that is we have ways of doing things. These things in our normal day to day lives outside of business are called habits. And habits are a way of doing things that you know you need to do. And those are the same thing as process. I'm not quite sure why the business world has decided that habit isn't fancy enough to be the term that we use. So we do call them process in a business or organizational standpoint, but they're functionally the same thing. Anything we do to go from inputs to a known output is a process. One example of this might be to turn clay into a pot. You know, the labor, the energy, the, the clay itself, the paint, the things we use. It's the creative process. For another example, we could look at the baking process of turning ingredients plus time in an oven into a cake. That is a process. Now these are two physical processes that you can see taking shape. But this process mindset also applies very heavily to non tangible.
