You ask someone, "How does onboarding work?" They tell you a clean story. It sounds great.
Then you watch the work for ten minutes and you see the real truth. A form is missing. Someone hunts for an email. A spreadsheet has the real status. A Slack message becomes the handoff.
That gap is why automation projects feel cursed.
Why interviews mislead
People are not lying on purpose. They are describing what they think should happen.
They skip the annoying parts because it feels normal to them. They forget the detours because they do them on autopilot. So your process doc looks clean, but your build breaks the first day.
A real example
A team says, "When a client pays, we onboard them." Sounds simple.
But when you watch, you see a different chain. Payment hits. Someone checks the bank. Someone copies the address from an email. Someone creates a folder. Someone asks in Slack, "Did we get the intake form?" Then the kickoff call gets booked.
If you automate the story, you miss the real inputs and the real handoffs.
What to watch instead
You do not need to shadow people for days. You just need one real run.
Pick one workflow and watch it happen once. While you watch, capture three things.
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Trigger: what starts the work in real life? A form, an email, a payment, a call, a Slack message.
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Artifacts: what do people touch to make it happen? Save the real stuff: the email, the form, the spreadsheet, the template. These are the system.
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Breaks: where does it slow down or get weird? Where does someone ask a question? Where does it get handed off?
The simple fix
When you document a workflow, write two columns:
- what people say happens
- what actually happens
Then fix the biggest mismatch first. It is usually a missing input, a handoff with no owner, or an exception that happens every week.
Why this matters
If you build on the fantasy version of a workflow, you get fragile automation and constant rework. If you build on the real version, simple automations start working the first week.
If you want help with this, book a discovery call.
If I watched one workflow in your business for 15 minutes, which one would you pick?