One of my favorite stories about processes and documentation:

- Work at a hedge fund

- Every evening, the whole firm "cycles" to start the next trading day

- Step 7 of 18 fails

- I document Step 7 and then show it to a bunch of folks

- I end up having a meeting where I say: "Two things are true: 1. You all agree that Step 7 is incorrectly documented. 2. You all DISAGREE on what Step 7 should be doing"

I love this story as it highlights that JUST WRITING DOWN what's happening can be a giant leap forward in terms of getting people to agree on what the process actually IS. If you don't write it down, everyone may go on basing decisions on an incorrect understanding of the system.

A related story:

"As I was writing the documentation on our market data system, multiple people told me 'You don't need to do that, it's not that complicated'. Then they read the final document and said 'Oh, I guess it is pretty complicated' "