the way we've always done it

I have spent a lot of my career helping to update legacy processes into new frameworks - one of the big challenges I have often encountered is breaking free from the way the process works today, which is often a product of system or tool constraints that don’t exist when you graduate from a process that is driven by extracts and spreadsheets to master data and connected workflows.

The issue isn’t necessarily that people lack imagination, it’s more that the constraints of the old way are so deeply embedded that they feel like they are immutable facts - not questionable process design choices. There are actually well-documented cognitive biases for this - status quo bias (our natural preference to keep things as they are) and functional fixedness (the more we’ve practiced a solution, the harder it is to see alternatives). When you’ve been running a process for fifteen years, your brain literally stops treating it as a design choice and starts treating it as a law of nature.

In my personal experience, this has led to the classic “lift & shift” for the first version of a modernisation project - it’s only then, once stakeholders can physically touch and use the process built on a modern framework that the world of possibility seems to click. The lift & shift also sometimes leads to a challenge where the same process moved into a structured bespoke solution, although it has been improved from a global interconnected process point of view, can often be more painful to manage in a web application than it was in a spreadsheet! Especially for processes that have heavy data manipulation.

The problem is that when you’re dealing with innovation, traditional requirements gathering, brainstorming, can’t capture everything or identify every single potential issue - regardless of how much time is spent up front, something will always come out of the woodworks later down the road.

A working prototype can flush these things out much earlier in the process.

Put something tangible in front of stakeholders that isn’t bound by the old constraints and the conversation changes entirely. Creativity & innovation flourish in this type of environment. Conversations shift from, “we need to do X” to “what if we did Y instead?”

AI tools make this type of rapid prototyping effective as a collaborative design & systems thinking tool to help break free of the constraints of the way we’ve always done things, and optimise the way we can be working moving forward.

The prototype isn’t designing the process - the people are. The prototype just gives them something real to react to, so they can see past their own assumptions and focus on what the process actually needs to be, rather than what it’s always been.