I love automation. I do. The idea of taking repetitive, mind-numbing tasks and turning them into something that… happens? Beautiful. It’s like giving your team little pockets of time back, over and over again.
But.
(There’s always a but.)
Automation becomes this quiet wrecking ball in your operations if you’re not careful. You don’t even see the damage right away. Everything’s humming, moving faster, scaling without needing to hire. Until bam, something breaks. A wrong email. A billing error. A customer pissed off because the bot didn’t know they were special.
And then you realize: we automated too fast. Too blindly. Too trusting.
That’s why I’ve become a big believer in a risk-first automation discipline. It’s three simple steps—score, pilot, and audit—but they make all the difference between “wow this saved us a ton of time” and “uhhh who built this thing?”
Step One: Score It Before You Touch It
Look, not all automation is created equal. Some are harmless, like tagging a contact when they book a call. Others? Not so much. Like changing payment terms, sending contracts, or kicking off fulfillment without a human in the loop.
So, before we automate anything, we score it. Real simple scale:
- What’s the business impact if it fails?
- How many people does it touch?
- How often will it run?
- How visible is the output (internally and externally)?
- Can it be reversed quickly?
If the answers lean toward “high risk” and “hard to fix,” guess what? It doesn’t go straight to prod. It gets the slow treatment.
- Low risk? Green light. Tweak away.
- Medium? Proceed with caution.
- High? Not without a human override or a whole lot of logging.
This one step? Saves us from so many “it seemed like a good idea at the time” moments.
Step Two: Pilot With Intention, Not Hope
Piloting sounds obvious, right? But most people flip the switch and “see what happens.”
Don’t do that.
A proper pilot is scoped. Controlled. Logged. You set success criteria before you launch, not after it breaks. You run it on a test cohort. You monitor outputs. You ask your team:
- Did this save time without creating rework?
- Did anyone get confused, stuck, or surprised?
- What would break if this were scaled?
Sometimes, we even run “manual automation” first. Like, have a human pretend to be the automation and follow the logic. That uncovers weird edge cases that no tool ever warned us about.
And this isn’t just for technical builds. Even no-code stuff. Especially no-code stuff. Just because it’s drag-and-drop doesn’t mean it’s safe.
Step Three: Audit Like You’re the One Who’ll Get Blamed
Because let’s be honest, you probably will.
Auditing isn’t just checking logs. It’s looking at the entire flow as if you didn’t build it. Ask dumb questions. Click every branch. Trigger every edge case.
We do monthly audits on our highest-touch automations. Not because we expect them to break. But because they eventually will. Inputs change. APIs update. Vendors go offline. And when that happens, the only thing worse than failure is not knowing it failed.
Also, document your automation as if you’re writing to your replacement. No one wants to be in a crisis at 8 p.m. on a Thursday, digging through a spaghetti Zapier setup named “Test2 vFinal FINAL.”
Automation Is a Knife. Use It Like a Chef, Not a Cowboy.
Everyone’s excited to automate. The pressure to move fast, save money, and scale with fewer people is absolute. But bad automation doesn’t just slow you down. It erodes trust. Internally. With customers. With yourself.
This is not a call to move slower. It’s a call to move deliberately. Score every idea. Pilot with eyes wide open. Audit-like failure is already in motion.
Because when automation works well, nobody notices it. But when it fails, everyone does.
So yeah, automate. Just don’t autopilot it.
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