Stop the process worship, you’re not Adeptus Mechanicus.

For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, here is a quick primer.

In the grim dark future – the year 40,000 – the human race spans the solar system, but instead of peace, there is only war.  The entire human society has been remade to fuel the war: soldiers, religion, and the factories.

That is where the Adeptus Mechanicus comes in.

In the future, science is not science… it is religion.

Each machine must be prayed to, and specific steps must be done before using each one.  If not, it is blasphemy, and they believe the machine will not work.

This is a dark example of what happens when people and companies get married to their SOPs and frameworks and don’t allow – or, in the case of the book, kill people – for introducing innovation.

This almost invariably happens in any company that grows, and in my experience, there are multiple reasons for it.

The first is human nature.  

We like things to be predictable.  It gives us the illusion of control.

The second reason is success. 

Processes get built because at some point, they worked. The danger is that people forget the context in which they were created. A process that was perfect for a five-person team becomes suffocating for a fifty-person team. Instead of asking “does this still serve the outcome,” people ask “are we following the steps.”

The third reason is fear. 

Once a system is in place, changing it feels risky. Nobody wants to be the person who broke the thing that was working. So the safest move becomes obedience, not improvement. Over time, questioning the process becomes socially unacceptable, even when the process is clearly outdated.

This is exactly how organizations drift from being outcome-driven to ritual-driven.

The irony is that SOPs and frameworks are supposed to exist to reduce cognitive load and free people to think at a higher level. When they turn into sacred texts, they do the opposite. They replace thinking with compliance.

Strong companies treat process like equipment, not doctrine. You maintain it. You upgrade it. You discard it when it no longer fits the mission.

The Adeptus Mechanicus did not lose its way because it lacked intelligence. It lost its way because it confused reverence with wisdom.

If you want to build something that lasts, make outcomes sacred, not procedures. Processes should serve people and results. The moment they demand worship, you are no longer building a business. You are building a shrine.