the smell of flowers

I've been thinking about process a lot lately. My current attraction is, no doubt, due to our ongoing work (read: frustration) with part-time student enrollment management. I'm finding all sorts of analogies among our business process and the basic processes teachers of writing (technical and otherwise) have come to know, love, and loath.

Start with the traditional four-step writing process. I like to use this model as an introductory framework with groups new to process mapping and analysis.

• Step 1: Generating Ideas -- a universal activity found within all processes that have a "generative" opening activity.
• Step 2: Mapping the Argument -- essentially the same activity as structuring the iterative phases of the process (actions, decisions, terminal events, etc.).
• Step 3: Composing a Draft -- the build out phase and the fun/creative part where team members begin to "see" the relationships, bottle-necks, and outcomes among discrete activities.
  
• Step 4: Revising -- the point at which we revisit the entire process to refine, improve, tweak, and modify.

So maybe Flowers and Hayes had it right. Buried beneath all the blather about cognitive, expressivists, and social constructionist theory is a timeless, simple, and useful model. That's good design.