Avoiding 'automation theater'

You automate your invoicing and feel wonderfully modern — until you realise you're now sending wrong invoices forty times as fast. What went wrong?

Automating the mess

Automation theater is when something looks automated and modern but isn't actually better — often it's worse. The classic version: you take a process that's already broken — a stale price list, a confusing step — and you automate it. The brokenness doesn't go away. It just runs at machine speed, so now the mistake happens far more often and far faster than a human ever managed.

Fix first, then automate

The order is the whole lesson. First fix the process by hand until it reliably produces the right result — correct the price list, cut the confusing step. Then automate the version that works. Done in that order, automation multiplies a good process instead of a bad one. If a step still needs your judgement, that's a sign it isn't ready to hand over yet.

The shape of it

• —Automating a broken process makes it fail faster, not less.
• —Automation multiplies whatever it's pointed at — good or bad.
• —Fix the process by hand first, then automate the version that works.