One thing that process and architecture folks are good at is analyzing the as-is and then optimize it.
But why? What would happen if we wouldn’t do “As-Is” and rather start with a fresh perspective when designing new processes?
Scary?
I think it is scarier what our next guest, Dr. Michael Rosemann, pointed out — that you can only optimize so far until nothing is left for you to do. And then what?
Michael is the author/editor of twelve books available in five languages and the author of more than 400 refereed papers. He is globally known for his work in areas such as BPM maturity models, context-aware BPM, process innovation, rapid process redesign, affective process design and process modelling quality. Michael has presented his work at all major global BPM conferences and delivered keynotes in more than 30 countries. His research projects received funding from industry partners such as Accenture, Cisco, Infosys, PwC, Rio Tinto, SAP, and Woolworths.
In this episode of the podcast, we talk about:
- From efficiency to opportunity. After decades of classic BPM work (maturity models, rapid redesign, reference models), Michael pivoted away from pure cost-cutting toward “crafting desirable futures” — a shift sparked partly by his father asking if making companies more efficient was really the legacy he wanted to leave.
- Three reasons change happens: urgency (a burning platform), curiosity (wanting to test the unknown), or ambition (a clear, desired destination). Leaders who fall into none of these tend to stay “big, fat and happy” — and stuck.
- Root cause analysis of success, not failure. Instead of diagnosing what’s broken, Michael’s team studies “positive deviants” — top performers — and replicates their hidden practices across the organization, using process mining to find and scale what’s already working.
- The seven types of opportunity (a counterpart to Lean’s seven wastes), including concepts like “first data advantage” — looking at what data your process starts with and asking who else might value it (e.g., an airline offering pet-sitting because it already knows who’s traveling with pets).
- Process expansion, attention, and generalization — three of the seven opportunity types, illustrated through Domino’s “pizza tracker” (monetizing attention), and Uber’s expansion from people to pizza, patients, and produce.
- “Lot size of one.” The goal isn’t catching up to best practice — it’s building processes so unique that no competitor, and no amount of design thinking, could replicate them (e.g., QUT’s concept of an “upgradeable degree”).
- Opportunity appetite statements. Just as organizations have risk appetite statements, Michael argues they need the opposite — a deliberate, structured statement of what opportunities they’re willing to pursue, modeled in part on NASA’s approach to balancing risk and ambition.
- Make the future tangible. Examples include a six-minute video imagining a trauma patient’s full recovery journey in 2033, used to rally internal and external stakeholders around a shared vision rather than incremental process fixes.
- RX, EX, TX — Revenue Design, Emotional Experience, and Trust Experience. A framework for evaluating opportunities beyond pure transactions, including the idea of “transactional benevolence” (e.g., Netflix pausing billing for inactive subscribers, or a retailer refunding a price drop you didn’t even know about).
- Reframing the business case. To get leadership buy-in for trust- or future-focused initiatives, Michael suggests shifting the conversation from short-term cost to long-term opportunity cost — the price of not acting.
- AI as a thinking partner, not just a tool. Michael previews a prototype built with SAP Signavio that uses AI to proactively surface opportunities from an uploaded process model — “reverse prompting,” where the tool greets you with an idea instead of waiting for a problem.
- The Future’s Triangle. A simple framework for understanding organizational inertia: the weight of the past, the distraction of the present, and the pull of the future — and why most companies only operate on the first two.
Michael can be found on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelrosemann/.
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Additional information
- Michael teaches at the Queensland University of Technology and leads the Centre for Future Enterprise
- The book “Entshittification”: https://www.amazon.com/Enshittification-Everything-Suddenly-Worse-About-ebook/dp/B0DQJ5TWB1
Credits
Music by Jeremy Voltz, www.jeremyvoltzmusic.com
Roland Woldt has spent nearly 30 years helping organizations cut through complexity — transforming how they think about their architecture, processes, and strategy. A former officer in the German Armed Forces, he has held executive and leadership roles at Accenture, Software AG/IDS Scheer, KPMG, and iGrafx, leading engagements across the full project lifecycle from solution design to rollout.
Roland is the author of Successful Architecture Implementation and Successful Process Mining Projects, and co-hosts the podcast What’s Your Baseline?, where he demystifies Enterprise Architecture and BPM for practitioners worldwide. Learn more at woldt.de.
