“The classic mistake is using a tool to lead your processes. What we’re seeing now is: document the process, optimize the process, then use that to guide your selection of tool and the implementation of it.” — Don Back
Session context: 2026-05-28_Mastermind — Don Back, reflecting on what he sees across companies and among the PhD grads he advises, named the adoption error of 2024–25 and the corrective pattern now emerging.
Core Idea
The dominant way organizations adopted AI through 2024–25 was tool-first: pick a platform, push everyone to use it, and hope value falls out. Don Back’s diagnosis is that this inverts the actual dependency. The tool can only be chosen well once you know what work it’s supposed to do — and you only know that once the process is documented and optimized. The correct sequence is three steps: document the process, optimize the process, then let that drive your selection and implementation of the tool. When the tool leads, it quietly reshapes your work around its defaults; when the process leads, the tool serves the work you’ve already decided is right.
Don framed this as the classic information → knowledge → wisdom ladder. Raw information becomes knowledge through structure; knowledge becomes wisdom only when a human decides what it’s for. AI is extraordinary at the first two rungs and helpless at the third. “Guiding an AI and really understanding what its purpose is — that’s the human domain. And that I see as high value.” The process-documentation step is where that human wisdom gets encoded so the AI can be pointed at the right job rather than left to lead.
This lands with extra weight against the displacement backdrop Don raised: AI is absorbing the entry-level role functions that junior people used to be hired into. The durable human position in that environment is not “operates the tool” — it’s “documents, optimizes, and directs the process the tool runs.” The person who owns the process owns the wisdom layer, and the wisdom layer is the part AI can’t take.
Practical Application
Before adopting (or re-adopting) any AI tool into your business, run the sequence in order:
- Document the process as it actually runs today — every step, every decision point, every handoff. Not the idealized version; the real one.
- Optimize it on paper first — remove redundant steps, clarify decision criteria, name the inputs and outputs of each stage. This is the wisdom layer made explicit.
- Only then choose the tool — select and configure it to serve the optimized process, not the other way around.
If you can’t write the process down, you’re not ready to automate it — you’re about to let a tool define it for you.
Related Insights
- Insight - Manual Before Automated — Process Hygiene as the Foundation of AI Workflows — the prerequisite discipline: get the manual process clean before automating.
- Insight - AI Focus Discipline — Operationalize Revenue Processes Before Exploring New Tools — the same priority ordering applied to where your attention goes.
- Insight - The Death of Information Arbitrage — Why Your New Moat Is Codified Judgment, Not What You Know — the wisdom layer is the moat; this is how you build it.
- Insight - Get Coached Now or Get Fired Later — Positioning Coaching for the AI Displacement Era — the displacement context that makes process-ownership the durable human role.
Evolution Across Sessions
Builds on Insight - Manual Before Automated — Process Hygiene as the Foundation of AI Workflows (2025-10-30) and Insight - AI Focus Discipline — Operationalize Revenue Processes Before Exploring New Tools (2026-04-30). New development: Don Back adds the explicit three-step adoption sequence (document → optimize → select tool) and the information/knowledge/wisdom framing, anchoring the principle to the AI-displacement reality where process-ownership is the human’s defensible position.