Arcane Process

Every long-lived organization carries these: steps that exist because a system demanded them in 2011, forms feeding a report nobody reads, approval loops added after an incident whose circumstances no longer apply. They persist because they are undocumented — people follow them because that is how they were shown, and nobody can say which steps still matter. Retraining staff away from an arcane process is usually described as overcoming resistance, which misdiagnoses it. The obstacle is that nobody knows which parts are load-bearing, so abandoning any of it feels risky.

Encoding a process as skills in Centralpoint forces the question, because each step must be stated explicitly and attributed to a reason. In practice a substantial proportion turns out to be vestigial, and the exercise produces a shorter defensible process rather than a documented long one. The resulting rules carry named owners and review cadences, so the next accretion is deliberate rather than accidental.