In September, I had the privilege of chairing Shared Services & Outsourcing Week in San Diego. Chairing means you move between rooms all week, from keynotes to case studies to discussion groups, and you start to hear the same ideas from people who have never met. The official theme was “Stability Through Constant Change.” What I heard underneath it was more practical with leaders talking about what has to be in place before change, what change exposes, and what can, and does, break.

Six themes came up very consistently and each one leads to a question worth asking about your own operations.

Trust Is Infrastructure

Resilience is a muscle that has to grow and should be in place prior to big changes. Several sessions came back to this idea from different directions. A GBS organization that has delivered on its commitments for years walks into a disruption with credibility already established. One that has not spends the crisis trying to prove its value while the business watches. Trust is what gives a function room to slow down and get things right when the pressure is highest.

Is your GBS a trusted partner today, or does it only get credit when it survives a crisis?

Assumptions That Weren’t Tested

Some of the most honest moments of the week happened in the discussion groups. Experienced leaders running mature operations admitted that assumptions they had relied on for years had never been checked. They described AP automation that never delivered the savings in its business case, vendor relationships that quietly cost more than anyone was tracking, and operating models nobody would design the same way today.

None of this came from a lack of talent and these assumptions held up well enough that nobody had a reason to revisit them.

Which of your own assumptions would not survive being said out loud in a room full of peers or when put under severe pressure?

Proof, Not Deployment

I’ve written pretty extensivley on this one over the last several months. The AI conversation has moved the needle on ROI. A year ago, saying “we implemented it” was enough to earn a slot on the agenda. In San Diego, the question in the room was whether you could show that a result changed. That is a higher bar than many organizations hold themselves to internally, and it is the right one. It is the same point we covered in Issue 29. An outcome that was never defined before deployment is very hard to prove afterward.

If someone asked you to prove your AI investment changed a result, could you?

Fix the Process First

Here’s another one that gave me some validation on my newsletter. This came up in procure to pay, in AP transformation, and in the conversations about growth. Technology layered on a broken process does not remove the friction. It moves it somewhere else, often somewhere harder to see. Issue 28 made the case that process debt and data debt live largely in GBS, and SSOW reinforced it. Automation tends to expose that debt rather than pay it down.

The sequence of events matter. You have to understand how the process runs today, fix the exceptions that keep recurring, and clean the data before bringing in technology to accelerate something that is ready for it.

Where are you buying a tool to solve what is really a process problem?

Growth Exposes the Foundation

Opening a new location, building the business case for expansion, and getting through the first 12 to 18 months of a new shared service all test the same thing. Was the operating model built to grow, or built to run exactly as it does today?

Several sessions described the same trap. An operation that runs well in one location often depends on unwritten rules and the knowledge of a few experienced people. When the business tries to replicate it somewhere new, those gaps surface fast. Documenting how the work gets done is what makes it possible to train, staff, and monitor a second site with confidence.

Would your current model hold up if the business asked you to double in size next year? Are you scalable?

The Human Cost of Efficiency

Maybe the most talked about! As automation and AI move further into shared services, several speakers pushed back on the idea that efficiency comes free. Metrics can improve while relationships and judgment wear down quietly underneath them.

This is a useful counterweight to the argument I made in “Your Judgment Is Not As Valuable As You Think.” AI can take on far more analytical work than many leaders give it credit for. The trust, context, and relationships that make a GBS function valuable to the business still belong to people, and they are worth protecting deliberately.

As you automate further, do you know where your human connections and relationships may be affected?

Where to Put Your Attention This Week

You do not need to tackle all six of these at one, but I do think you should know where you stand, at least in your mind. Pick the one that made you most uncomfortable while reading and spend an hour with your team on that question. The discomfort is usually a good indicator of where the value is.

If any of these patterns are showing up in your operation and you want a second set of eyes, I would welcome the conversation. Clear Cycle Advisors works with finance and GBS leaders on liquidity management, GBS evaluation, and CFO services, starting with a clear view of how the work runs today. DM me here or email me at ian.thompson@clearcycleadvisors.com

A final word about SSON. Chairing this event gave me a close look at how much effort goes into bringing this community together, and I am grateful to the SSON team for the opportunity. With more than 220,000 members, SSON is the largest community of shared services and GBS professionals in the world. If you are not part of it yet, it is worth joining at ssonetwork.com