Good systems leave room for people.

Setting up a Monday board gives me an unreasonable amount of joy. My boss maybe has learnt by this point not to ask me questions about my flows, because my eyes light up and I say “let me just share my screen …”

Give me a messy process, a few overlapping responsibilities and an opportunity to make everything visible, and I'll be quite happily occupied for hours. But I've learnt that my enthusiasm for organising things isn't necessarily shared by everyone who then has to use the system.

Fair enough, really.

I've been working on making marketing requests easier to manage, particularly how work is submitted, tracked and assigned.

From Marketing's perspective, having a consistent process makes perfect sense. We need the right information, an understanding of priorities and a clear idea of who's responsible for what. Ideally without having to conduct a small archaeological expedition through someone's inbox or Slack or that one video file from two years ago.

But the person making the request has their own job to do. They might only need Marketing's help once every six months. They're probably not particularly interested in the intricacies of our workflow, and nor should they have to be.

They just want to know what information to provide, where to send it and what happens next. And that's where I think designing a good system gets interesting.

It's relatively easy to create a process that makes sense to the person who designed it. The real test comes when someone encounters it without all that background knowledge.

Do the instructions make sense? Does the system ask for information people can reasonably be expected to have? What happens when a request doesn't fit neatly into one of the available categories?

And what happens when someone needs an actual conversation rather than another dropdown menu?

I've become increasingly interested in treating those moments as useful feedback.

If people keep asking the same question, perhaps the answer isn't obvious enough. If they're finding ways around a process, there might be a perfectly reasonable explanation. And if every exception requires someone to perform administrative gymnastics, we've probably made things more complicated than necessary.

That doesn't mean abandoning structure. I love structure. Quite possibly more than is socially acceptable.

But good processes should account for different ways of working, different levels of familiarity and the fact that people don't always arrive with identical information, confidence or capacity.

This is particularly important when you consider accessibility and neuroinclusive ways of working. Clear instructions, visible decisions and predictable processes can remove a surprising amount of unnecessary cognitive load. But flexibility matters too.