State of New Process 2026

New Process Podcast Jul 29, 2026 | 0

#68 Let’s recap the State of New Process 2026. After 25 years in process management and in the middle of the AI hype, I take a step back to answer one bigger question: where does New Process actually stand today — and why does BPM need a new chapter in the age of artificial intelligence?

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In this episode, I don’t talk about process modeling, process ownership, or AI in isolation. Instead, I step back and connect the ideas we’ve explored over the years into one picture: what New Process is today, how it grew from a way of thinking into a framework and now into a living knowledge platform, and what all of this means now that everyone is rushing to put AI on top of processes they never really understood in the first place.

The line I carry through the whole episode is this: No AI without process, no process without purpose.

If you’ve been following the podcast for a while, this episode helps you connect many of the ideas we’ve discussed. And if you’re new to New Process, I honestly think there’s no better place to start.

You’ll learn:

What New Process really is in 2026 — an attitude, a system, and a vision, and how it grew from a framework into a knowledge platform
Why a process is a social system of people creating value together, not a diagram — and why “first human, then digital” is a logic of effect, not a timeline
How the New Process BPM Framework works as the operating system for a process-driven organization: life cycle, role concept, communication & steering, and notation
Why AI is an amplifier — welcome for analysis and support, but never a replacement for the human participation that makes a process someone’s own — and why roles and governance matter more in the age of AI, not less
What process experience and the “energy meter” mean: measuring not just how fast a process runs, but how it feels to the people who run it every day

If you need support in building a process-driven organization, let’s talk! You are welcome to schedule a meeting with me.

Take the next step

If you want a structured way to apply all of this, I’ve put together a free course: BPM Roadmap – Your Path to a Process-Driven Organization. It walks you through how to take the framework and actually apply it in your own organization, and it comes with a workbook to hold your next steps. It’s free — just go to newprocesslab.com/roadmap.

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Transcript

Please note that the transcript was generated automatically and only slightly adjusted. It does not claim to be a perfect transcription.

Mirko: 0:00 Welcome to episode 68 of the New Process Podcast. It’s great to have you here. You may have noticed that it’s been around six months since I published the last episode — and that’s not because I stopped thinking about process management. Quite the opposite. Over the last months I’ve been working intensely on further developing New Process. I’ve done a lot of work on process strategy and on helping organizations become truly process-driven. I also explored new ideas around process experience and continued to work on the tool question. Today I’m back at Sehlendorfer Strand, taking the time to reflect on where we are with New Process right now.

Mirko: 1:00 At some point during the last few weeks I realized that New Process somehow has evolved — not because I decided to change it overnight, but because all these different ideas, experiences, and discussions slowly started to come together. That’s exactly why today’s episode is special. It is not another episode about process modeling, process ownership, AI, or process architecture. Instead, I’d like to take a step back and answer a much bigger question: where does New Process actually stand in 2026? What have I learned over the last years, which ideas have become more important, which assumptions have changed, and why do I believe that process management needs a new chapter, especially in the age of artificial intelligence?

Mirko: 2:00 If you’ve been following the podcast for a while, I hope this episode helps you connect many of the ideas we’ve explored over the years. And if you’re new to New Process, I honestly think there is no better place to start. So thank you for being here. Lean back, enjoy the episode, and let’s explore where New Process stands today.

Mirko: 2:30 Let me start with something I saw a lot over the last years. A company decides it finally wants to get serious about processes, so they buy a BPM tool — a good one. They spend months modeling boxes, arrows, swim lanes, the whole thing. Then they sit back, look at what they’ve built, and quietly ask themselves: “Okay, what now?” I’ve watched that moment happen for more than 20 years, in huge corporations and in tiny teams. And here’s the uncomfortable part: it’s happening right now again. Except this time it’s not the BPM tool, it’s AI. Same energy, same rush — let’s automate, let’s put AI on all processes — and the same blind spot underneath it. We’re trying to speed something up that we never really understood in the first place.

Mirko: 3:30 So the question I keep coming back to, the question this whole episode is about, is not what happened since the last State of New Process episode. It’s simpler and it’s bigger: where does New Process stand today? That’s it. After all the conversations, all the episodes, all the work with organizations trying to make processes actually work for the people inside them — New Process has changed. It’s grown up. It started as a way of thinking about processes, then it became a framework, and today it’s something more than that. For the next 40 minutes or so I’m not going to sell you anything. I’m going to talk about where this comes from, what it became, and where it’s going — especially now, in the middle of the AI noise. And if there’s one line I want to carry through the whole episode, it’s this: no AI without process, no process without purpose.

Mirko: 5:00 But before we talk about roles or AI or the future, we have to talk about something much more basic — something almost everyone skips. What actually is a process? And a short reflection first: why New Process? I get this question surprisingly often. Not because processes are new, and not because everything I’ve learned about BPM is suddenly wrong — definitely not. It’s called New Process because I believe we need a new way of thinking about processes: a way that starts with purpose instead of models, a way that ends with improvement instead of documentation, a way that recognizes that people don’t simply work in processes — they bring processes to life. Changing the way we think about processes changes the way we design organizations and processes. That’s why I still call it New Process.

Mirko: 6:00 So let’s talk about the core — what New Process actually is. A process is not first a model. It’s not a tool. It’s not an automation pipeline. A process is the way people work together to create something of value. That sounds almost too simple, but stay with me, because everything changes once you take it seriously. If a process is really about people working together, then documenting isn’t enough, standardizing isn’t enough, automating or “AI-ing” definitely isn’t enough. You can have the cleanest model in the world, but if the people who actually live it don’t get the point of it, if they don’t feel involved or just experience it as a burden, then you don’t have a process-driven organization — you have a very expensive drawing.

Mirko: 7:00 This is the heart of New Process: connecting two worlds that usually don’t sit at the same table. On one side, solid, proven business process management — structure, roles, metrics, governance, the discipline. I love that world; I grew up in it. On the other side, the human-centric attitude we know from new work and new ways of working — meaning, trust, participation. The sentence that captures the whole thing for me is this: BPM gives you structure. New Process gives that structure meaning, energy, and acceptance. Structure alone doesn’t move people, and meaning alone doesn’t scale. You need both.

Mirko: 8:00 I want to be careful here, because this is where people often misunderstand me. When I say human-centric, some people hear “soft” — that we’re dropping governance and discipline and just being nice to everybody. It’s the opposite. Human-centric does not mean less rigor; in some ways it means even more. The roles still have to be clear, the responsibilities still have to be assigned, the steering still has to happen. Human-centric isn’t a soft add-on you sprinkle on top after the real work is done — it’s the attitude you start with, there from the first line you draw. There’s a phrase we use: “First human, then digital.” And I need you to hear it correctly. It’s not a timeline — it’s not “spend the first few years on feelings before you touch technology.”

Mirko: 9:00 It’s a logic of effect. It’s about what has to be true for the technology to actually help. Get the human part right, and the digital part multiplies it. Get the human part wrong, and the digital part multiplies that too. Because that’s the one thing about technology — and we’ll go deeper on this later — technology doesn’t replace process work, it amplifies it. Good process work and bad process work, both. It’s a magnifier.

Mirko: 10:00 Let me make this concrete, because I don’t want you to think this is philosophy. This way of working isn’t a theory I dreamed up at a desk. It’s been used in fertilizer companies, in aviation, in hospitals, in insurance, in automotive, in publishing — in organizations of 35 people and organizations of 100,000 people. Different industries, wildly different sizes, but the same underlying idea, and it holds. I learned this the hard way. For a big part of my career I worked at the Lufthansa Group, and those years shaped me more than almost anything else in my work life. That’s where I learned what professional process management really means — not from a textbook. When I studied business information systems there wasn’t a single process management lecture.

Mirko: 11:00 So I learned it the hard way, in the daily work, on huge, complex international processes. I saw how a process actually lives, how many people are involved, and how different two locations — north and south of Frankfurt Airport, for example — can be for the very same process. I’m grateful for those years; they laid the foundation for everything that came after. But across all of them, and everywhere, I kept bumping into the same quiet failure: processes documented with enormous care that still, in most cases, didn’t land in people’s day-to-day work.

Mirko: 12:00 There are exceptions — you might remember the episodes with Christoph Bunker or Lars Müller. But in so many processes, so much energy was poured into models that in the end almost nobody opened. And it wasn’t because the methods were bad — the methods were good. Something else was missing: the people who worked in and on those processes were too rarely part of building them. That’s the moment New Process was really born for me — not as a rejection of everything I’d learned, but as the next logical step. I didn’t throw away what worked; I just kept asking: why does all this good, careful work so often fail to reach the people it’s for?

Mirko: 13:00 So we don’t start with a diagram. We start with a conviction: processes are social systems. People accept a process when they experience meaning, when they are involved, when they know where they stand. And if processes are social, then process work needs two things, in order: first an attitude, then a system. Principles and framework. Before we dive into the framework, one personal observation: my own understanding of process management has changed more over the last few years than in the two decades before. I still love structure, governance, and architecture. But what excites me most today is seeing people discover the purpose behind their work — watching a process owner become a real leader, watching teams improve a process because they truly care about it. That’s when process management becomes alive.

Mirko: 14:00 So where does the attitude live? In what we call the New Process Principles. There are eight of them, and I want to be precise about what they are, because people love to turn principles into a poster nobody reads. The principles are not a method, not a ninth tool next to the other tools. They are the mindset you bring to everything else — the reason New Process looks at processes differently. I won’t march you through all eight like a shopping list; that would be exactly the kind of thing I’m trying to get us away from.

Mirko: 15:00 But let me give you the spirit of them: trust the people who work in and on the process; involve them from the start, not at the end; inspire people and help them grow; design collaboration around what humans actually need; and the one I’d put right at the center — give a process a purpose. Let me stay there, because for me purpose is the secret weapon. Most people treat the purpose of a process as a soft, fluffy add-on — a nice sentence you write once and then forget. I see it completely differently. Purpose is a steering anchor that gives direction.

Mirko: 16:00 It’s the thing that tells you how to decide when no model exists. Should this step exist? Should we automate this? Should we make an exception here? You can’t answer any of that without knowing what the process is actually for. And there’s a simple way I separate two words that get tangled up all the time: purpose and strategy. Purpose gives direction and meaning. Strategy describes the path to get there. Purpose is the “what for” — Wofür machen wir das? Strategy is how we get from where we are to where we want to go. Two different questions — don’t blur them.

Mirko: 17:00 So the principles are the attitude. But an attitude on its own doesn’t build an organization. You can be the most human-centric leader in the world and still have chaos. You need to translate the attitude into something you can actually run — and that’s the New Process BPM Framework. The picture I use for it, the one that clicks for people, is this: the framework is the operating system for a process-driven organization. It’s what makes sure that purpose, roles, communication, steering, architecture, modeling, and improvement don’t happen by accident — they work together on purpose. The framework has four parts, and they’re not a menu where you pick your favorites. They connect.

Mirko: 18:00 The first is the New Process Life Cycle: seven phases, from defining the purpose all the way through continuous improvement. I often call it the process of process management — the PDPM, Prozess des Prozessmanagements — because that’s really what it is. Managing a process is itself a repeatable process that should be managed. It’s the mother of all processes. The second is the New Process Role Concept. Here’s the single most important distinction in the whole framework, so let me slow down. There are two kinds of responsibility that people constantly confuse.

Mirko: 19:00 On one side there is design responsibility: who owns how the process should work? That’s the process owner. On the other side there is execution responsibility: who makes sure the process actually gets carried out in a given unit? That’s the line manager. One person can hold both roles at once — that’s totally fine — but even then the two responsibilities stay separate in your head. The moment you blur them, you get the classical mistake: you make the process owner accountable for execution, and suddenly nobody knows who’s actually responsible for what. The process owner is never accountable for execution, only for design.

Mirko: 20:00 Let me make that real. Picture a recruiting process that runs at several locations. The design — how recruiting should work — is defined once, centrally. But the actual hiring happens locally, in each place, with its own people and characteristics. That’s what we call an instance: the same process living in different execution contexts. That’s exactly why you need process managers on the ground — to coordinate execution in their instance and carry the local reality back into how the process evolves. One design, many lives. If you don’t separate those two things cleanly, you either crush the local reality or you lose the shared standard. You want both.

Mirko: 20:40 The third part is the New Process Communication and Steering Model: five communication flows, and the whole point of them is almost aggressively practical. Decisions should get made at the right level, in the right format, instead of everything turning into an escalation to whoever shouts loudest. I’ve experienced that more than once. When you have real communication flows in place, you don’t need drama. Strategy conversations happen where strategy belongs, at senior management level. Day-to-day coordination happens where it belongs, and the levels connect through the communication flows — lately we also call them steering formats.

Mirko: 21:00 Let me give you the rhythm of it, because this is where it stops being a diagram and starts being a heartbeat. In practice you have a cadence. Every few weeks, the people coordinating the process sit together and see how it’s actually running: where are the improvement ideas, who needs training, where are people stuck? A bit less often — say, monthly — the conversation lifts toward strategy: are we still on the path we agreed on? And once a quarter, maybe it goes up to the top, where the big company-wide decisions get made. Weekly, monthly, quarterly — each level has its format. You have to define it specifically for your process and your organization. Each decision has its home.

Mirko: 23:00 Nothing has to explode into a crisis to get attention. That’s what steering actually feels like when it works: quiet, rhythmic, boring in the best possible way. I realized myself over the last year how powerful this is — having specific steering formats on management level and on operational level, connecting the levels, putting topics where they should be visible, and giving visibility to the people. That’s so important to bring a process to life. The fourth part of the framework is the New Process Notation — the language we draw our processes in. I’ll be honest: I’m not a fan of forcing everyone to read complex BPMN 2.0.

Mirko: 24:00 BPMN has its place — if you’re going to technically automate something or analyze it in fine detail, fine, use it. But for building a shared understanding, for getting a whole organization to actually see and use its processes, it’s too much. New Process uses a deliberately simple language — simple enough that someone who has never taken a process course can look at the model and get it. And if you later need technical depth, you can translate it into BPMN 2.0. But you don’t start there. One more thing and then I’ll let this breathe. People sometimes ask: “Mirko, what maturity model do you use? How do we know how far along we are?”

Mirko: 25:00 I keep it deliberately lean — just four steps. Implicit: the process lives only in people’s heads. Documented: it’s written down. Steered: it’s actually being managed. And improved: it’s getting better over time. That’s it. And maybe you notice what’s not on that list. Automation is not the top step anymore. Automation isn’t the crown at the end of the maturity ladder — it’s just one possible shape a steered, improved process might take. Which is the perfect place to turn to the topic everyone wants to talk about. Because if purpose gives direction and meaning, what happens when the entire industry gets obsessed with a technology that has no idea what anything is for?

Mirko: 26:00 Let’s talk about AI. No AI without process. Here’s what I find fascinating about almost every AI conversation in our field right now: they all start in the same place. Which AI tool? Which model? Which agent platform? What’s our automation rate? The technology comes first, and everything else is supposed to follow. New Process turns that around completely. We don’t start with the tool — we start with the process, its purpose, and the people who carry it. And then, only then, AI shows up as one possible way to strengthen that. One amplifier among several, not a category of its own, not the main character.

Mirko: 27:00 Let me be clear, because people try to put me in a box on this: I’m not against AI, not even a little. My position is split on purpose, and I think the split is the whole point. When I say AI I don’t mean one thing. There’s classic analytical AI, which finds patterns in data. There’s generative AI, which writes, drafts, and summarizes. And there’s plain automation, which often isn’t AI at all. You don’t need a deep technical breakdown, but you do need to stop treating AI as one magic word. Different tools, different jobs — stop treating AI as one magic word. AI for analysis? Absolutely — let it read the data, spot the patterns, summarize the feedback, help the process owner make sense of their own process.

Mirko: 28:00 AI to support the people in the roles? Yes — let it prepare training material, draft communication, interpret the numbers, flag inconsistencies. On that side, I’m a big fan of using AI. Think about the everyday reality of a process owner: drowning in feedback from three locations, a stack of metrics they don’t have time to read, a model somebody needs explained in plain language for training. That’s exactly the kind of work where a generative AI assistant is a gift — cluster the feedback, interpret the numbers, explain the model. I’m a fan of self-explaining models, but for more complex BPMN 2.0 models, use gen AI to explain them.

Mirko: 29:00 The AI doesn’t decide anything — it clears the fog so a human can decide better. I use it like that constantly. But AI to fully generate and model your process for you? There I stop. Not because I think AI can’t produce a decent-looking model — it probably can, and I’ve seen a lot of them. It’s because of something I’ve watched for as long as I’ve been doing this work: when people don’t take part in shaping a process, they don’t own it. It never becomes theirs, never becomes their baby. And a process that isn’t anybody’s baby is a process nobody defends, nobody improves, nobody really runs. It just sits there — technically correct and practically dead.

Mirko: 30:00 That’s the co-creation line: AI can support the work, but it cannot replace the participation that makes the work stick. One more principle I hold, because it surprises people: when something can be automated with clear, deterministic rules — plain old rule-based automation — I usually prefer that over AI. Why? Because AI always carries a risk of being wrong; it’s probabilistic by nature. AI earns its place where the deterministic approach runs out — where you need interpretation, where you’re supporting knowledge work, where rigid rules would break. AI doesn’t replace classic automation; it extends it into the messy territory where rules alone can’t go.

Mirko: 31:00 And here’s the part that cuts against the hype. Everybody assumes AI makes governance less important — the machine handles it now, relax. I believe the exact opposite. The more AI reaches into our processes, the more you need roles, governance, and steering formats — not less. Think about the questions that get sharper: Who decides whether an AI recommendation actually gets implemented? Who is accountable for an automated result? Who checks whether a rule is even still valid? And the one that keeps me up: who stops an automation when it starts producing the wrong thing? If you can’t answer those, you don’t have an AI strategy — you have an AI liability.

Mirko: 32:00 Notice that every one of those questions is a role question. Who decides? Who is accountable? Who checks? Who stops? That’s not a new invention for the AI era — that’s the role concept we already talked about, suddenly under a brighter spotlight. This is why I keep saying the framework doesn’t get replaced by AI; it gets needed more by AI. There’s also a risk I want to name, because it doesn’t show up on a dashboard: when people start just following the tool’s output — the AI says “do this” and everyone does it without understanding why — you slowly lose the process knowledge itself. The organization gets faster and dumber at the same time.

Mirko: 33:00 That’s what I actually worry about — not robots taking over, but people switching off their brains because the interface looks confident and nice. And one careful thing about the legal side, then I’ll move on, because I’m not a lawyer and wouldn’t pretend to be. The rules around AI are moving toward a risk-based logic: the more a system influences decisions that affect people, the more transparency and human oversight it demands. That’s good — and it’s not a burden that fights against process management. That is process management: clear responsibility, clear oversight, clear formats. The stronger the AI, the more you need exactly the things New Process was already about.

Mirko: 33:40 One quick correction, because it comes up constantly. People lump process mining into the AI-and-automation bucket. I don’t. Process mining is an analysis method — it shows you exactly what is happening in your process. It’s incredibly powerful and useful, but it lives inside steering, improvement, and strategy, not inside the automation conversation. Process mining shows you what happens; purpose explains what it should happen for. Two different questions — don’t let the first make you forget the second.

Mirko: 34:00 So where does this leave us? AI is an amplifier, a powerful one, which is exactly why I say it the way I do: no AI without process, and no process without purpose. Get that order wrong and you don’t get the transformation — you just get expensive noise. And the only real question left is the one nobody in the hype cycle is asking: what exactly are we amplifying?

Mirko: 35:00 Let me show you the answer I’ve fallen in love with: process experience — process you can feel. For most of the history of this field we’ve measured processes from the outside: how long does it take, what does it cost, how many errors, throughput, cycle time, quality. All important, all real, and I’m not throwing any of it away. But when was the last time anyone measured how a process feels to the people who run it every single day? Not whether it’s fast — whether it gives them energy or drains it. That’s the idea I can’t let go of, and it has a name in what we’re building: the energy meter.

Mirko: 36:00 The energy meter is simple to describe and kind of profound once it sinks in. Alongside the classic numbers, it captures how a process feels for the human inside it. Is this activity energizing? Neutral? Draining, confusing, frustrating, motivating? You make that visible — right on the process model — so the people responsible can actually see where human energy is leaking out of the system. This idea came out of a podcast conversation: episode 59 with Professor Eugene Bogodistov, about how good process management can help prevent burnout. His idea was that the energy level of the people in a process is a resource — a real one — and you should design work so it gives energy instead of stealing it.

Mirko: 37:00 That conversation turned into a concept — which is exactly how this whole thing is supposed to work, but more on that in a minute. The energy meter is just one expression of a much bigger idea: processes shouldn’t only be documented, they should be experienced. I call it process experience, and once you see it, you’ll see it everywhere. It’s the difference between a process that lives in a binder nobody opens and a process people can find, understand, feel, discuss, and improve because they can actually engage with it. I’ve seen this physically, in a room.

Mirko: 38:00 When I was in Linz with the Makers Lab team, we built a walkable process landscape — a recruiting process you could literally walk through, step by step, with objects, with emotions, the whole thing laid out in space on the attic of the Tabakfabrik Linz. People didn’t read that process, they walked it. You could stand inside the moment where a candidate waits two weeks for an answer and feels forgotten. You could experience the hurdle of getting a yes or a no on an application. You could talk about how the step feels, not just what it does.

Mirko: 39:00 I promise you, you’d understand that process in a way no diagram on a slide has ever achieved. That’s process experience made physical, and it completely changed how I think a tool should work. Here’s the quiet standard I hold any human-centric tool to. It’s not about how many notation symbols it offers, or how cool the BPMN 2.0 editor is — it’s the opposite. Can everyone in the organization actually find their processes? Can they understand a model without a training course? Can they see who’s responsible and see the purpose of the process, not just its steps?

Mirko: 40:00 And can they give feedback right there and feel heard — heard by the owner? A tool that adds complexity fails this test; a tool that gives orientation passes it. That’s the whole bar: orientation over complexity. There’s also a thing we call the pizza game. It goes all the way back to my time at Lufthansa, where the first version came together with Ole Tillmann and some colleagues. The whole point is the same: make process orientation something you feel, not something you’re lectured about. The claim underneath the whole thing is three words: experience your process.

Mirko: 41:00 Because if we really want processes to be human-centric, we can’t only ask how fast they run. We have to understand how much energy they give the people inside them — or how much they take away. Which raises the last question: if a single process can be experienced like that, what does that mean for a whole organization, for a whole movement? So let’s talk about the vision — where New Process is going. Let me tell you what New Process actually is today, structurally, because this is the part that’s changed the most and the part I’m most excited about. Today, New Process is a knowledge platform.

Mirko: 42:00 The New Process BPM Framework, published last year, was the first big output of that platform — not its origin. And the framework isn’t even the main thing I work on anymore. The main thing is the knowledge itself. The principle behind it: knowledge first, publishing second. There is one structured, living, growing body of knowledge — the principles, the framework, the roadmap, the examples, the stories — and everything else is a projection of that. The framework, the free roadmap course, this podcast, the newsletter, the workshops, maybe a future book, the tool — all of it pulls from the same source, so that wherever someone meets New Process, they meet the same thing.

Mirko: 43:00 I picture it as a journey. Somebody discovers the idea on LinkedIn or on this podcast, goes deeper with the New Process Guide, the course, the framework, and eventually they’re actually doing it — building the roadmap, running the roles, maybe using a tool. Every format catches people at a different point on their path, and the knowledge base makes sure we’re all walking the same road. And here’s the part I love most: the journey runs in both directions. The outputs are also inputs. Remember the energy meter? The idea didn’t come down from me at Sehlendorfer Strand. It came from a podcast conversation — an output that became a source. Every good interview, every workshop, every real experience with a company feeds new learning back into the base. It’s not a broadcast, it’s a loop.

Mirko: 44:00 And where is that loop heading? Let me say it as plainly as I can, because this is the standing answer to the whole question of this episode: processes will no longer only be documented, they will be experienced. The long-term vision has a name in my head — a process experience platform. Not a product I’m announcing; a direction. An environment that helps people live their processes together: find them, understand them, feel them, discuss them, improve them. In that vision AI has a role, but notice — AI is the enabler, not the destination. The destination is human, as it always was.

Mirko: 45:00 That’s the shift. We didn’t end up at New Process as a framework; we ended up at New Process as a way of experiencing work together. The framework is how we get the structure right; the experience is what it’s all for. Let me pull the whole thing together. Where does New Process stand today? Here’s the honest answer in five movements. One: we start from a conviction — processes are social systems, not diagrams; people creating value together. Two: that conviction becomes real through an attitude and a system — eight principles for the mindset and a four-part framework, the operating system for a process-driven organization.

Mirko: 46:00 Three: when AI shows up, we don’t lose our heads. We put it in its place — a powerful amplifier, welcome for analysis and support, but never a replacement for the human participation that makes a process someone’s own. And in the age of AI, roles and governance get more important, not less. Four: we stop measuring processes only from the outside and start caring how they feel, because a process that drains people is a broken process, no matter how fast it runs. Five: we’ve grown from a framework into a platform — a living body of knowledge with one direction: processes you don’t just document, but experience. And holding all five together, one line: no AI without process, no process without purpose. That’s where we stand.

Mirko: 47:00 So what does that mean for you? I want to end where I started — that quiet moment where someone has bought the BPM tool, drawn all the boxes, and is sitting there thinking, “Now what?” Here’s what 25 years have taught me: the “now what” is never answered by a better tool, a smarter model, or a faster automation. It’s answered by going back to something almost embarrassingly simple. Why does this process exist? Who works in it? Do they get it? Do they trust it? Did we build it with them, or just hand it out to them?

Mirko: 48:00 It’s not nostalgia — it’s the opposite. I think it’s the most future-proof thing you can do, because the more powerful the technology gets, the easier it becomes to automate the wrong thing beautifully. And the one protection against that — the only one I’ve found so far — is to keep the people in the process in view, to keep asking what it’s for. That’s what New Process is today: an attitude, a system, and a vision all at once. And I’m more convinced than ever that in the age of AI it doesn’t get less relevant — it gets more. Because in the end, a process is just people working together, trying to create something good. Let’s not automate that away. Let’s bring it to life.

Mirko: 49:00 So here’s one thing I’ll ask you for, and it’s not to buy anything. If any of this resonates, don’t try to transform your whole organization on Monday morning. Start with one process. Just one. And before you automate it, before you optimize it, before you touch a single tool, ask it this simple question: what is this actually for? Give it a purpose. Bring the people who live in it into the room and answer that question together. And if you want a structured way to take the next step, I’ve put together a free course called BPM Roadmap: Your Path to a Process-Driven Organization. It walks you through exactly this — how to take the framework and apply it in your own organization. There’s a workbook to hold your next steps. It’s free — just go to newprocesslab.com/roadmap. The link is also in the show notes.

Mirko: 50:00 That’s where New Process stands today. That’s the State of New Process 2026. For many years, process management has been about improving work. I believe the next chapter is about improving the experience of work — helping people understand it, shape it, and improve it together. That’s the journey New Process is on, and I’d genuinely love you to be part of it. Thank you for spending this time with me. Until next time — live your process journey purposefully, every single day.

Mirko: 51:00 Today, not one more thing — just a reminder to get from listening to building a process-driven organization. Go to newprocesslab.com/roadmap and get started now. Thank you very much for listening. Bye bye and auf Wiedersehen.

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