Process and architecture folks excel at analyzing the as-is and optimizing it. But why? What if we skipped "As-Is" entirely and designed new processes from a fresh perspective?

Scary? Our guest, Dr. Michael Rosemann, argues it's scarier to keep optimizing — because eventually you run out of things to optimize. Then what?

Michael is the author/editor of twelve books in five languages and over 400 refereed papers. He's globally known for his work on BPM maturity models, context-aware BPM, process innovation, rapid process redesign, affective process design, and process modelling quality. He's presented at major global BPM conferences and delivered keynotes in 30+ countries, with research funded by Accenture, Cisco, Infosys, PwC, Rio Tinto, SAP, and Woolworths.

In this episode, we cover:

• From efficiency to opportunity. After decades of classic BPM work, Michael pivoted from cost-cutting toward "crafting desirable futures" — partly sparked by his father asking if making companies more efficient was really the legacy he wanted. Three drivers of change: urgency (a burning platform), curiosity (testing the unknown), or ambition (a clear destination). Leaders without any of these stay "big, fat and happy" — and stuck.
• Root cause analysis of success, not failure. Instead of diagnosing what's broken, Michael's team studies "positive deviants" — top performers — and replicates their hidden practices org-wide using process mining.
• The seven types of opportunity (a counterpart to Lean's seven wastes), including "first data advantage" — examining what data your process already generates and who else might value it (e.g., an airline offering pet-sitting because it already knows who's traveling with pets).
• Process expansion, attention, and generalization — three opportunity types illustrated by Domino's "pizza tracker" (monetizing attention) and Uber's expansion from people to pizza, patients, and produce.
• "Lot size of one." The goal isn't catching up to best practice — it's building processes so unique that no competitor, and no design thinking exercise, could replicate them (e.g., QUT's "upgradeable degree" concept).
• Opportunity appetite statements. Just as organizations have risk appetite statements, Michael argues they need the opposite — a deliberate statement of which opportunities they're willing to pursue, partly modeled on NASA's approach to balancing risk and ambition.
• Make the future tangible. Example: a six-minute video imagining a trauma patient's full recovery journey in 2033, used to rally stakeholders around a shared vision instead of incremental fixes.
• RX, EX, TX — Revenue Design, Emotional Experience, and Trust Experience. A framework for evaluating opportunities beyond pure transactions, including "transactional benevolence" (e.g., Netflix pausing billing for inactive subscribers, or a retailer refunding a price drop you didn't know about).
• Reframing the business case. To win leadership buy-in for trust- or future-focused initiatives, Michael suggests shifting from short-term cost to long-term opportunity cost — the price of not acting.
• AI as a thinking partner, not just a tool. Michael previews a prototype built with SAP Signavio that uses AI to proactively surface opportunities from an uploaded process model — "reverse prompting," where the tool greets you with an idea instead of waiting for a problem.
• The Future's Triangle. A framework for organizational inertia: the weight of the past, the distraction of the present, and the pull of the future — and why most companies only operate on the first two.

Find Michael on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/michaelrosemann/

Reach us at hello@whatsyourbaseline.com or subscribe at whatsyourbaseline.substack.com. Support the show on Patreon: patreon.com/c/whatsyourbaseline.

When should you start with process and architecture in a startup?
That was the question that we've asked ourselves (as if there is a real-life example currently happening :-) and then we thought, “Why not ask someone who is living in this space?”

Vidar co-founded his first tech startup at 19 because he didn't know enough to know how hard it would be. 30 years on, he has gone mostly from startup to startup, usually as the first technical hire or a co-founder. He has both bootstrapped and raised VC capital and recently spent 3 years working at a VC fund. He now runs a tech consultancy focusing on the intersection of DevOps and AI while working on his next big thing.

In this episode of the podcast, we talk about:

• A startup is defined by pre-revenue or pre-profit status combined with rapid growth ambition — a chip shop is operational from day one, not a startup. Once you're profitable and growing modestly, you're a lifestyle business.
• Early-stage capital is the most expensive capital you'll ever spend, because you're paying in equity. The earlier you are, the larger the slice of the company you trade away for the same dollar amount.
• VC investors expect most of their portfolio to fail and are only looking for the 10x–100x outlier. If you can't raise your next round within about 18 months, their interest moves on — so failing fast and validating quickly is the entire game.
• AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to building a working prototype, letting founders show investors something tangible and compelling much faster than ever before.
• But the industry is swinging back hard toward upfront specs and documentation, because AI coding agents can't infer your unique business context. Writing a truly good spec turns out to be one of the hardest parts of the entire software development process — and most teams have been skimping on it for 25 years.
• Your truly proprietary assets are your ideas, processes, use cases, and customer segments. The generated code is a commodity — everyone building on the same AI tools has access to the same output.
• Lightweight processes pay off quickly once a startup begins to scale. The absence of basic QA, project management, and clearly written tickets is almost always what causes delivery to break down first — not the process itself.
• A common and costly mistake is over-engineering: developers building for 10 million users when the total addressable market is 10,000. This happens when engineering teams are never told what the product actually is or who it's actually for.
• Process and architecture function as a communication layer — aligning engineering, sales, and leadership around a shared vision, the customer they're serving, and the strategy connecting the two. It builds buy-in, and buy-in produces better work than a paycheck alone.
• Vision must be communicated continuously from the hiring process onward, not just stated once and assumed to stick. Developers detach from the "why" quickly when daily work becomes purely tactical.
• Both one-on-one check-ins and group meetings are essential to a healthy team. People rarely surface real blockers, interpersonal tensions, or technical concerns in group settings — individual conversations build the trust that makes those things visible before they become crises.

Vidar can be reached on LinkedIn here and also has a website: hockstadconsultng.com.

Reach out by emailing ⁠hello@whatsyourbaseline.com⁠ or subscribe to our newsletter and articles on Substack at whatsyourbaseline.substack.com.

Roland and J-M go solo to pull back the curtain on something that's been years in the making: BPM OS, a purpose-built, local-first tool stack designed to help small, talented process and architecture teams stand up a real BPM practice — without the vendor dependency, IT overhead, or 12-month procurement nightmare.

In this episode of the podcast we talk about:

• Most BPM programs fail not because of bad content, but because organizations treat it as a pure IT exercise — buy a platform, check the box, and wonder why nothing sticks.
• The three pillars every BPM capability needs are content, governance, and adoption — yet most organizations only address the first one.
• Knowledge rented from consultants or SaaS vendors disappears the moment you stop paying; BPM OS is built on the principle that you own it outright, forever.
• BPM OS targets three groups: small internal teams doing more with less, consulting organizations that want baked-in methodology for client delivery, and vendors looking to bundle a white-labeled practice layer with their platforms.
• Groundwork is the brainstorming and planning app — dump ideas onto a canvas, sort them into zones, and shift into structured planning mode with priorities and rough timelines.
• Playbook is a lightweight wiki for capturing structured knowledge, course profiles, stakeholder analyses, and methodology documentation — with templates so you never start from a blank page.
• Atlas generates visual subway maps of your learning curriculum or capability landscape, complete with time-sensitive station states, deprecation indicators, and links back to Playbook pages.
• Outline lets you define the detailed content structure of a course or deliverable in a hierarchical, mind-map-style view — moving from “What do we need to teach?” to "Exactly what are the chapters and items?”
• Course Flow is a Kanban-based project management tool for developing and iterating on courses, complete with a built-in feedback form, an inbox for triage, and a status dashboard across all active projects.
• Cadence is a personal (and optionally team) task planner organized by day and category — with recurring daily items, carry-forward of incomplete tasks, and a simple velocity metric to spot overload before it becomes a crisis.
• The entire stack runs on Node.js, saves files as Markdown and JSON (no database required), plays nicely with Google Drive or OneDrive for backup, and optionally connects to GitHub or GitLab for full version history.
• Apps interoperate through lightweight linking and import/export — cards from Groundwork flow into Atlas, tasks from CourseFlow export into Cadence, and every Playbook page carries a permanent link that works anywhere in the stack.

Find out more and download your free personal copy of Cadence at whatsyourbaseline.com/bpm-os—and check the episode show notes for a PDF overview of all six apps.

Reach out by emailing ⁠hello@whatsyourbaseline.com⁠ or subscribe to our newsletter and articles on Substack at whatsyourbaseline.substack.com.