Don’t pave the cow path

A teammate shared a lesson this week that a former CEO used to talk about: don’t pave the cow path. It’s a beautiful warning against taking an inefficient, accidental process and simply making it faster or more permanent. The image behind it is perfect. Cow paths are meandering trails worn into the ground by cattle wandering more or less at random. When towns grew up around them, people often just paved right over those crooked trails — locking in routes that no one would ever have designed on purpose. It has no shortage of applications today. We inherit a clunky workflow and reach straight for automation, never pausing to ask whether the workflow should exist in the first place. Speed up a broken process and all you’ve got is a faster broken process — a nicely paved cow path. So before automating, it’s worth the time to figure out whether you’re automating the right thing at all. Don’t pave the cow path.