“No effort in this world
is lost or wasted;
a fragment of sacred duty
saves you from great fear.”
-The Bhagavad-Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 40 trans by Barbara Stoler Miller

For many years, I have believed that process is more important than product. You do not always have control over outcomes. Even with our best efforts, it is often the case that people fail.

However, I have recently come to see another kind of failure among people that only care about process. When you remove results from consideration, then a certain subset of people believe it is enough to have made an attempt, to have participated. However, they do not want to be responsible for outcomes.

These people wash the dishes. However, it does not concern them whether the dishes are clean after their process. To this archetype, this pattern repeats across a wide swath of their activities. It is enough to have made some minimal effort. I called. I talked to someone. They performed some action, and this is enough. It does not matter to them whether they accomplished the task, or not. In some cases, people with this problem desperately do not want responsibility – not to accomplish a task or even for their own lives. They want someone else to blame for their problems.

This reveals a problem in focusing on process. The implicit assumption is that people involved in the process are making their best effort. They are improving the process. The reality is that you cannot improve a process without a focus on outcomes nor can you judge how well a process works without them.

If you are just going through a process and completing it counts, you simply have a system to rationalize failure.