🚢 In 2015, I walked into call centers and did something most companies are just now realizing they need to do.
I mapped every single thing the agents did.
Not as a PowerPoint exercise. As a functional system.
We identified every question, every possible answer, every decision branch. We studied the phrases that retained customers versus the ones that lost them. We pulled in the psychology, the methodology, the special offers available that day.
Then we eliminated everything else from the agent’s screen.
Inspired by the McDonald’s POS model — at each state of a customer interaction, the agent sees exactly two or three options. Nothing more. Click one. Next screen appears. The right question, at the right moment, with the right options.
The spreadsheets disappeared. The Word docs with phrases nobody read disappeared. The tribal knowledge that left when the senior agent quit — gone. Replaced by a system that encoded it.
That’s what people now call “the enterprise graph.” The complete map of all functions, all SOPs, all workflows — canonicalized, AI-readable, measurable.
I’ve been deploying versions of that for a decade.
🦑 What I learned: companies don’t resist the automation. They resist admitting what it means — that once you reduce a role to a decision tree, you’ve also described exactly when that role becomes unnecessary.
How much of your team’s work is already a decision tree in disguise?