Imagine you have a tough problem to solve and you need to bring together, say, eight strong-minded stakeholders and get them to agree on a way forward. Unfortunately, they each have different vested interests they are determined to protect. They are also conscious that they will need to sell whatever solution emerges to the folk back home and any sign of weakness will be seized upon. The pressure is on – a lot is at stake.

You are alarmed when the participants start playing games. They can’t seem to agree on all sorts of procedural issues that you consider to be relatively trivial in the light of the problem they have been brought together to solve. The meeting breaks up having failed to produce anything other than an unsatisfactory vague compromise.

Now imagine you are organising a high-profile conference for delegates from nearly 200 countries who are expected to agree something contentious in the space of two weeks. Once again, you find people lapse into playing games with many points of order that take ages to resolve. Miraculously, the conference produces an eleventh-hour fudge.

It is hard to get eight strong-minded characters to agree, let alone 200. Ed Miliband, secretary of state for energy and climate change, expressed his exasperation that process was getting in the way of substance at the recent Copenhagen conference. I know what he meant, but my reaction was to say “process is substance”. In fact, it is so substantial that time and time again it sabotages the task.

I find that the managers I work with invariably underestimate the importance of agreeing adequate processes (for example, how they will work together, make decisions, etc) before settling down to the easy bit: solving the problem.

The outcome of the conference in Copenhagen may have been a disappointment, but it is a timely reminder that processes need at least as much attention as tasks.

Process isn’t the tail that wags the dog; it is the dog.