Every industry I have worked in has the same unspoken hierarchy. At the top sit the people who are considered "creative." Below them, the people who "execute." And somewhere else entirely, usually pictured in a different building, sit the people who "do process." The assumption is that process is what unimaginative people do because they cannot do the interesting work. I want to argue, briefly and with feeling, that this is wrong.

I have built SOPs for Netflix post-production pipelines, KPI frameworks for national marketing campaigns, vendor-management structures for fifteen-client creative studios, and evaluation rubrics for frontier AI models. In every one of those contexts, the people who were skeptical of the paperwork were also, over the course of the engagement, the people who missed the most deadlines, argued hardest about revisions, and eventually left or were asked to leave. The paperwork was not the price of the work. The paperwork was what made the work possible.

What writing it down actually does

The main function of an SOP is not compliance. It is memory. You are leaving a note for your future self, who will be tireder, more distracted, and working on a different project when the relevant situation recurs. The note says: here is what we figured out. Here is why. Here is what not to try again. The present self writes it down. The future self benefits. If you have ever been six months into a project and found yourself wondering why you decided to do X instead of Y, you have missed the SOP that would have told you.

The secondary function is calibration. A written standard gives everyone on the team the same thing to point at. Disagreements stop being about who thinks what. They become arguments about whether the rule is right, which is a better argument to have. When the rule is right, you keep it. When the rule is wrong, you revise it. Either way, you have moved the disagreement from personal preference to documented procedure. This is one of the single most reliable ways I know to reduce the amount of pointless politics in a team.

The third function, which is the one almost nobody talks about, is trust. When I start working with a new client, and they notice that the checklists are ready, the onboarding doc is written, the review schedule is on a calendar, the cost tracker is live — something relaxes in them. They understand, without being told, that they are working with someone who has built this before. The paperwork is a form of communication. It says: I have taken your project seriously enough to write about it.

The objection

The objection to writing things down, when it is articulated at all, is that it is slow, bureaucratic, and kills creativity. I think this is genuinely wrong, but I want to steelman it first because I understand why people say it.

The objection is correct about bad SOPs. Bad SOPs exist. They are the ones written by someone who has never done the work, for people who are then required to do the work in a way that does not serve it. Bad SOPs are everywhere — in HR, in corporate compliance, in the worst kinds of government paperwork. Most people encounter bad SOPs before they encounter good ones, and conclude that process itself is the problem.

Good SOPs are different. They are written by the person who has just done the work. They describe what actually happened. They are short. They flag the specific places where a reader would otherwise waste time. They are updated whenever a new failure mode is discovered. The entire purpose of a good SOP is to let future creative work happen without having to rediscover the basics.

A personal note. I did not arrive at this view naturally. My brain does not default to process. It defaults to doing a thing well once and getting bored. I started writing SOPs because I realized, around age 25, that the alternative was re-learning the same mistake on every project. The paperwork was cheaper than the re-learning. It still is.

A small manifesto

If you do creative work, and you consider yourself above writing things down, I would like you to consider the possibility that you have confused two things. One is the actual act of creation, which is irreducible and has to be done fresh each time. The other is the scaffolding around the act — the setup, the handoffs, the review cycles, the recurring decisions. These are not the creative work. These are the infrastructure that lets the creative work happen on schedule and to a standard.

Writing down the infrastructure does not reduce your creativity. It protects it. Every minute you do not spend on process is a minute you could spend on the actual thing. The paperwork is the loom. The weave is yours.

I say this with respect to every talented person I have worked with who resisted writing anything down. I understand the impulse. I just think the impulse costs you more than you think.