It’s about decisions, not workflows
Xavier Vallée, Founder, Sapionic
Written in response to a McKinsey post on redesigning workflows for AI.
This post from McKinsey made me pause. It made me wonder whether these very expensive consultants selling these diagrams to their clients actually know where the value in AI sits. And if they do, whether they know how to deliver it. (PS: I don’t think they do).
So let me show you what delivering it looks like.
At Tour Partner Group, using the decision-centric approach I keep banging on about, we took one of our most complex processes, the kind that takes a new hire months of training to do well and three to five hours to execute by hand, and rebuilt it.
It now runs in 230.7 seconds.
Not a faster version of the old process. A different kind of system. And I will be blunt: It’s ground breaking, it’s magical. It is the most advanced piece of decision automation I have built or seen, and I have not come across anything like it in the papers the big firms keep publishing.
Getting there looked nothing like a normal transformation project. It forced a complete rethink of how everyone works. Our business analysts, our solution designers, our project and product managers all had to learn a new way of thinking, because the old playbook does not describe a system that reasons. A lot of my leadership energy has been spent on changing our mindsets, our approaches and on agentic designs.
What came out the other side is a genuinely innovative piece of agentic architecture that makes complex decisions at light speed.
But the clever system is not really the point. The approach behind it is.
Decision-Centric Transformation belongs at the heart of the value creation roadmap, not off to the side as an IT initiative. It is what links the opportunities to their P&L impact, scopes the foundational work, names the talent you actually need to recruit, and drives the culture change that makes any of it stick.
Which is what I keep repeating to everyone I meet: it is about decisions, not workflows.
Workflows only exist to manage complex decisions. Get the decisions right and the workflow redesigns itself. Miss them, and you have drawn a very neat diagram of nothing.