You’ve just moved into the CIO chair. Congratulations.

You spend the requisite month listening instead of talking, making no commitments, figuring out what’s going on. You find a department that operates through oral traditions and improvisation. It needs, in other words, a healthy dose of process.

What’s your next step?

Here’s what the answer isn’t: Design and implement great processes.

One of the stranger aspects of organizational change is that you can’t often fix a problem by trying to fix the problem. At least, you usually can’t fix problems directly, for two reasons. The first is that most of the problems you see are the symptoms of other, less apparent issues you don’t see. The second is that the number of levers you can pull and buttons you can push to influence the behavior of the organization you lead is surprisingly small.

If an organization is underperforming, its processes aren’t working as well as they should. This is a matter of definition: Process means how employees do their work.

That doesn’t mean you can fix an organization by fixing its processes. Far from it. If you want stronger processes, starting with process design doesn’t work very well. The buttons and levers lie elsewhere. Among the more useful:

• Changing the business culture, to encourage a process state of mind. If you need an organization that’s more orderly — one that operates through well-defined, continuously improving processes — begin with culture change. Otherwise, everything else you try to do will wither and die, killed through the passive resistance and malicious obedience of employees who just don’t see the point and who like the less-bureaucratic way things are right now.

• Educating process managers in the niceties of process management. Just as employees, left to their own devices, generally prefer informality to well-defined processes, process managers, left to their own devices, often prefer managing the work to managing the processes that manage the work.Nor is this necessarily a bad attitude. You can, in theory, manage processes by watching key performance indicators, dashboards, and exception reports without once interacting with a live human being. To manage the work you have to interact with the people who do it.If you want process to happen, process managers must learn the discipline of process management. If you want process to happen without doing more harm than good you’d better make sure they understand that process management isn’t an alternative to leading people — it’s a complement.

• Fixing the policy manual, most often by throwing out most of your policies. If the policy manual is thick it almost always means compliance has replaced strategy as the force driving the company.It also means that whenever anything goes wrong, most managers instinctively try to prevent recurrence with a new rule. The result: A stifling, choking bureaucracy in which following the steps, filling out the forms and above all following the rules matter much more than achieving anything that resembles a useful result.Once you’ve finished clearing out the policy underbrush, institute one new policy: Whenever possible, institute a guideline instead of writing a policy. Guidelines do the same sort of work that policies do, but they leave enough flexibility to get the job done.

• Reorganizing. Many executives reorganize the way Correge models change attire — frequently, as the mood takes them, to stay in fashion. Doing so has, as the saying goes, much the same effect as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. A roll of duct tape would be more useful.One reason the tool of reorganization is so often used incorrectly is that organizational structures are mis-represented whenever anyone draws them. Showing them as a hierarchy does a fine job of presenting reporting relationships. It fails to depict something far more important: An organizational structure is a set of boxes packed within bigger boxes set within even bigger boxes.The rule for business processes is straightforward: Processes break in proportion to the number and height of the organizational barriers they have to cross. The challenge for organizational designers is that however you organize, the total number of boxes … and therefore the number of barriers … won’t change very much.

  So when you reorganize you aren’t going to remove the barriers to all processes, because you can’t.

  All you’ll be able to do is to decide which processes you improve, and which you make more difficult.

  Choose carefully.