Before You Buy New Tech...Try a Whiteboard
A couple simple frameworks to try before you decide you need a new software program to fix your problems
We keep asking what new technology we need to fix our problems.
But maybe the better question is: who actually owns the problem in the first place?
Over the past few years—and especially the past few weeks—I’ve been in a lot of rooms where the solution on the whiteboard was a chatbot or a dashboard… when what we really needed was a business process review and a RACI chart.
Because here’s the truth: you can’t automate what you haven’t defined or what you’ve defined badly. And innovation doesn’t work if decisions are still trapped three layers up the chain, or scattered across ten stakeholders who think someone else is in charge.
This week on The Talent Code, we’re talking about:
The myth of innovation as a tech problem
How decentralized authority can supercharge execution
Why so many Army problems are process problems in disguise
And how to start fixing them—without buying a single thing
Because democratizing innovation doesn’t mean making everyone a coder or giving them the reins on procurement. It means getting really clear on who decides, who acts, and what outcomes we’re driving toward.
And sometimes… it really is just a RACI chart away.
You Don’t Need AI—You Need a RACI Chart
We’ve all been there.
A new tool hits the market. A dashboard promises end-to-end visibility of your process. An AI solution says it can cut your workload in half. And we start thinking, finally—this will fix it.
But more often than not, the problem wasn’t the lack of tech. It was that no one knew who was supposed to do what or had the wrong idea about a process.
In the Army, we’re obsessed with modernization. We talk about innovation, acquisition, transformation, and AI readiness—but we rarely start with the most basic, unglamorous question: Do we actually understand our current process? Or what that process could and should be?
Because if we’re being honest, a lot of our so-called modernization challenges aren’t technology problems. They’re business process problems in disguise. And before we can solve them with better tools, we need to solve them with better frameworks.
Let’s talk about three deceptively simple ones that can save your organization months of confusion, frustration, and wasted investment.
1. The RACI Chart: Fixing the “Who’s Got the Pen?” Problem
The RACI chart is one of the most underused leadership tools in a problem solver’s toolkit.
It stands for:
Responsible: Who is actually doing the work?
Accountable: Who owns the outcome?
Consulted: Who needs to give input?
Informed: Who needs to be kept in the loop?
That’s it. Four boxes. And yet, when done well, it can untangle months of email threads, missed deadlines, and ghost decisions.
I’ve seen RACI charts clarify:
Who’s supposed to route the new policy (and who’s just adding comments out of habit or, worse, out of attempted gatekeeping)
Who owns onboarding (and who thinks they own onboarding)
Who approves funding requests (and who holds the purse strings but doesn’t want to say no out loud)
Too often, we mistake collaboration for decision-making. We load up meetings with people who all have a say but no one with the authority. A RACI chart doesn’t fix the personalities—but it makes the roles crystal clear.
And before you buy an AI decision-support tool, you might want to figure out whose decision it actually is.
2. SIPOC: Before You Map the System, Map the Edges
SIPOC stands for:
Suppliers
Inputs
Process
Outputs
Customers
It’s a simple framework to zoom out and get a high-level view of a process before diving into the details.
Why does this matter?
Because too often, we try to automate a process that we haven’t fully scoped. We optimize steps in the middle before understanding what feeds into them—or who’s waiting at the end. And maybe the whole thing needs to be changed or eliminated.
Let’s say we’re trying to modernize a personnel action. We add a chatbot for status updates. Great! But the upstream supply of data is coming from someone’s desktop Excel sheet. Downstream, the output is still printed and walked to a signature authority. Suddenly, your sleek automation is just another layer of bureaucracy.
With SIPOC, you see the ecosystem. You identify choke points, broken handoffs, and mismatched expectations. It’s especially helpful when you’re working across directorates, commands, or agencies—anywhere the left hand and right hand rarely meet and have no idea what the other is doing.
SIPOC doesn’t give you every answer. But it gives you the right questions—and helps you avoid optimizing one piece of a broken system.
3. Swimlane Process Maps: Where the Bottlenecks Actually Live
If you want to see the real dysfunction in your organization, map your process in swimlanes.
Start with a simple process (e.g., onboarding a new team member, approving a TDY request, closing out an evaluation). Create rows for each team or function involved. Then walk through the steps. Every time the process passes to a new swimlane, mark it.
You’ll quickly see:
Where the bottlenecks live
How often the process bounces between teams
Where handoffs break down
Who’s adding value—and who’s just touching the paperwork
These maps are powerful because they turn intuition into evidence. They help leaders say, “Ah, that’s why this takes six weeks.” And they show you where automation might help—but also where simplification is a better first move.
In my experience, many processes can be cut by 30–50% in time and complexity just by eliminating redundant steps and clarifying ownership.
Automation should be your second optimization pass, not your first.
Technology Doesn’t Fix Confusion—It Scales It
Here’s the hard truth: if your process is broken, automating it just makes the broken parts go faster.
No amount of AI, workflow automation, or predictive analytics can fix a system that doesn’t know who decides what, when, or why.
I’ve seen amazing platforms struggle in implementation because they were layered on top of unclear processes. Fancy dashboards that couldn’t pull from the right source data. Ticketing systems built for teams with no shared understanding of their workflows. AI assistants answering questions no one was asking—or worse, the wrong ones.
Before you spend the budget, do the work:
Build the RACI
Map the SIPOC
Sketch the swimlanes
Interview your users (yes, humans!)
Ask: Is this process still serving us? Or are we just doing it because we always have?
Sometimes the real innovation isn’t a new platform. It’s clarity.
Final Thought: Innovate Like an Engineer, Not a Magician
Don’t get me wrong—I love tech. I’m knee-deep in AI strategy, digital modernization, and workforce transformation. But I’ve also seen million-dollar platforms fail to outperform a well-organized SharePoint site or a much simpler and less elaborate solution my team has rolled out.
And I’ve noticed that a lot of our successful innovators in the Department of the Army are or have been in their careers…Army engineers.
Maybe if you’re trying to innovate, lead like an engineer—not a magician.
Start with visibility. Then fix the foundation. Then—and only then—bring in the tools to make it smarter, faster, or more scalable.
Because a good RACI chart won’t impress at a demo day. But it might just save your team six months of chaos and blowing money on product customization that you really don’t need—and that’s a pretty great return on investment.
