Process vs. Practice: What's The Difference?

When pursuing success in business or other endeavors, two key concepts play a crucial role: process and practice. While some argue that process and practice are interchangeable, in reality, they're vastly different.

• Process refers to a series of steps that lead toward a desired result. It's a methodical approach that helps you break down complicated tasks into smaller, manageable parts, allowing you to complete each step more efficiently.
• Practice is repetition. Practice is performing an activity repeatedly to improve your skill set or achieve specific goals.

But how do we use process and practice to become more efficient and successful? Is one of them more crucial than the other? Can you do one without the other?

To answer these questions, we’ll dive deeper into process and practice and how to apply both.

What is a process? How to deliver desired results efficiently

When defining a process, the goal is to be as efficient as possible by identifying the steps you need to take from start to finish to achieve the desired result. When you set up processes, you're ensuring that tasks are completed efficiently and quickly while reducing the likelihood of errors or delays.

We use processes in our day-to-day lives without even realizing it. 

Think about following a recipe to make a meal — you follow instructions to cook the meal efficiently, including initial prep and preheating the oven way before you reach the step in which the food goes into the oven. Without clear steps defined in the recipe, you would feel frustrated (and probably hangry) due to it taking much longer than anticipated.

In business, you likely have a process for onboarding new clients — everything from collecting information, adding them to your CRM, billing systems, and project management tools, to what you communicate during onboarding. 

Without that process in place, think of how frustrating it would be for the client if you had to constantly go back to ask for additional information that you had missed. You can't deliver the desired customer experience if the necessary processes aren't in place to onboard the client efficiently.

Drawbacks of process

There can be downsides to processes, primarily when the process is too rigid, making it difficult to adapt to changing needs.

Consider an eCommerce company. They will have a process for order fulfillment, including order verification, packaging the order and shipping to the customer. While this process aims to deliver the product to the customer efficiently, it may not account for exceptional circumstances like rush delivery, holiday shipping delays, or supply chain issues.

This is where the flexibility and adaptive approach of practice come into play.

(Process and practice directly affect performance — here’s how we track that success.)

How practice helps you become adaptable

Unlike process, practice is not a set of procedures or rules, but rather a set of habits and adaptable actions in the day-to-day operations that allow you to adjust to situational needs. Each time you do your day-to-day tasks, you're always learning, growing your knowledge of the subject, and adapting quickly to varying conditions.

Let’s look at cooking again. Think about a chef in a restaurant, someone who practices cooking daily. In the restaurant, each dish on the menu follows a process to create — but what happens when a customer has a food allergy or other dietary restriction? When this happens, the chefs can rely on their daily practice of culinary skills to know what substitutions they can make to serve the dish to the customer while maintaining the overall experience of that meal.

If you're a marketing team that develops social media campaigns, practice comes into play when you need to adjust your campaigns. Whether due to internal scenarios or unexpected events such as a global pandemic or supply chain issues. By relying on the team's knowledge of marketing practices and trends, they can quickly pivot their campaign strategy while continuing to be creative and engaging.

In both examples, the team adjusted to situational needs by relying on the knowledge they've gained in their daily practice. However, replicating actions that were successful in previous situations can be challenging since practice scenarios may not accurately mirror real-world scenarios.

(Know the difference between outputs and outcomes, and which moves the needle for businesses.)

Balancing process and practice together

Finding a balance between process and practice is crucial for attaining success. When you focus on a balanced approach, you'll have a process in place that gives your team the flexibility to adjust to situational needs by incorporating practicable approaches. 

Without that balanced approach, you may be unable to complete the process in the face of unforeseen circumstances.

Back to the marketing team mentioned earlier. They'll have an overarching process that involves project ownership, budgeting, and feedback mechanisms. Bbut within that process, they're able to adopt practicable approach techniques such as brainstorming or A/B testing to tailor the campaign to their target market and current marketing trends.

Continually adapt your processes and practices

To continue to be successful, you'll want to review the processes and practices you have set up to see what can be tweaked, automated, added or removed. You'll want to involve team members in the day-to-day operations when reviewing your process to get their input on what changes are needed as practice uncovers better ways to accomplish goals.

"If you can't describe what you do as a process, you don't know what you're doing" — W. Edward Demin

Always encourage a culture of continuous learning, experimentation and innovation — you never know where it could lead to. Technology and industry are changing constantly, and we as individuals need to adapt as well or we'll get left behind.

Remember, while a process provides a structured approach to accomplishing tasks, it can become rigid and inflexible if it's not paired with the right practices. Likewise, practice allows for flexibility but often lacks structure and repeatability when they don’t have a process to fall back on. 

When you combine the benefits of both process and practice, you can become more efficient and adaptable while ultimately achieving the goals that you've set out.