One of the first questions asked in almost every strategy workshop is, “Who are our competitors?” It’s a logical place to start. Understanding the competitive landscape is essential when evaluating products, pricing, positioning, and market share. But it’s not always the right question when you’re designing a process. It doesn’t go nearly far enough, and it’s a mistake to stop there.   

The organizations that create the greatest competitive advantage won’t be the ones who study their competitors most closely. They will be the ones who understand their users, identify the unnecessary friction points, and leverage ideas from wherever the best experiences already exist.

When you’re designing a process, the goal isn’t to outperform your competitors. It’s to remove friction. Regardless of industry, process friction almost always comes from the same places: users can’t find what they need, information is incomplete or inconsistent, there are too many unnecessary steps, the process takes too long, or critical knowledge exists only in people’s heads. 

And the biggest one: Human nature. People naturally choose the path that requires the least effort, the least uncertainty, and the least amount of time. Great processes work with those instincts instead of against them. Your organization or industry does not hold a monopoly on any of these sources of friction. 

Your competitors don’t own the best ideas. They simply share many of the same constraints.  

So why are you trying to solve problems by looking only at a small slice of the available ideas? Your users are not comparing you just to your competitors any longer. Whether they realize it or not, users increasingly compare your processes to the best experiences they’ve had elsewhere. Digital tools and services have raised expectations across every aspect of work and life. As a result, users no longer evaluate processes in isolation. They carry expectations from one experience into the next. 

To be clear, not every process should be as simple as buying a book online. Some work is inherently more complex than others. But complexity should come from the work itself, not from the process surrounding it.  

It’s more than just what your customers see. Friction abounds inside the organization as much, if not more, than outside. It’s not, ‘Well, that’s the job.” Every unnecessary approval, duplicate entry, manual workaround, or search for information steals time from work that actually creates value. Over time, that doesn’t just reduce efficiency, it limits innovation. 

You may be thinking, ‘So what? Isn’t this what AI is supposed to fix?’ Nope. AI can help remove certain kinds of friction, but it cannot repair a fundamentally broken process. Feed AI a process with unnecessary approvals, unclear ownership, or poor data, and it won’t fix those problems. It will automate them faster and at a greater scale than a human ever could. A weak foundation must be repaired before you can build something stronger on top of it. 

The history of innovation is full of organizations borrowing ideas from outside their own industries. Some of the best process innovations don’t come from competitors at all. They come from organizations solving similar human problems in completely different industries. The Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London was looking to improve its handoffs from surgery to intensive care. Their search for a better process took them to what seems like an unlikely place: Formula 1. By studying how pit crews coordinate dozens of specialized tasks in seconds with remarkable consistency, they adapted the same principles to surgical handoffs. As a result, handoff outcomes improved to the point where the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) includes it in its patient safety resources. 

So, when you are ideating requirements, instead of ‘How is my successful competitor doing this?’, spend more time on ‘Who handles this scenario well?’. Look for organizations that have mastered the problem you’re trying to solve, regardless of industry. Then ask why it works and whether the underlying principles apply to your own challenge. 

The organizations that create the greatest competitive advantage won’t be the ones who study their competitors most closely. They will be the ones who understand their users, identify the unnecessary friction points, and leverage ideas from wherever the best experiences already exist. The goal isn’t to have the best process in your industry. It’s to create a process so intuitive that your users stop thinking about it altogether. The best processes aren’t remembered because they’re innovative. They’re remembered because they remove friction so effectively that users stop noticing the process altogether. 

Study your competitors to better understand your industry. Study everyone else to improve it. 

That’s the audit SCIGON runs before anyone touches automation: find the friction, fix the foundation, then decide what’s worth automating. Worth a conversation.