Ep. 116 - Opportunities for the Future: Michael Rosemann

Process and architecture folks excel at analyzing the as-is and optimizing it. But why? What if we skipped "As-Is" entirely and designed new processes from a fresh perspective?

Scary? Our guest, Dr. Michael Rosemann, argues it's scarier to keep optimizing — because eventually you run out of things to optimize. Then what?

Michael is the author/editor of twelve books in five languages and over 400 refereed papers. He's globally known for his work on BPM maturity models, context-aware BPM, process innovation, rapid process redesign, affective process design, and process modelling quality. He's presented at major global BPM conferences and delivered keynotes in 30+ countries, with research funded by Accenture, Cisco, Infosys, PwC, Rio Tinto, SAP, and Woolworths.

In this episode, we cover:

• From efficiency to opportunity. After decades of classic BPM work, Michael pivoted from cost-cutting toward "crafting desirable futures" — partly sparked by his father asking if making companies more efficient was really the legacy he wanted. Three drivers of change: urgency (a burning platform), curiosity (testing the unknown), or ambition (a clear destination). Leaders without any of these 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 org-wide using process mining.
• The seven types of opportunity (a counterpart to Lean's seven wastes), including "first data advantage" — examining what data your process already generates and 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 opportunity types illustrated by 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 design thinking exercise, could replicate them (e.g., QUT's "upgradeable degree" concept).
• Opportunity appetite statements. Just as organizations have risk appetite statements, Michael argues they need the opposite — a deliberate statement of which opportunities they're willing to pursue, partly modeled on NASA's approach to balancing risk and ambition.
• Make the future tangible. Example: a six-minute video imagining a trauma patient's full recovery journey in 2033, used to rally stakeholders around a shared vision instead of incremental fixes.
• RX, EX, TX — Revenue Design, Emotional Experience, and Trust Experience. A framework for evaluating opportunities beyond pure transactions, including "transactional benevolence" (e.g., Netflix pausing billing for inactive subscribers, or a retailer refunding a price drop you didn't know about).
• Reframing the business case. To win leadership buy-in for trust- or future-focused initiatives, Michael suggests shifting 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 framework for 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.

Find Michael on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/michaelrosemann/

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