What does it mean that workflow steps should be atomic?

Each step in a workflow should be small enough to complete without ambiguity.

Example: A content team has a publishing workflow with a step labeled "Prepare the article for publication." Three different editors interpret this differently: one checks grammar only, another also reformats images, the third also writes the social media blurb. When articles go live with broken formatting or missing social copy, no one knows where the process failed because the step was too large to diagnose. They replace the single step with five atomic steps — copyedit prose, resize and compress images, write meta description, draft social excerpt, preview in staging — and the errors become immediately locatable because each step either happened or it did not.

Try this: Take one recurring workflow from your life — morning routine, weekly review, project kickoff, content publishing, anything you do repeatedly. Write out every step as you currently understand it. Then, for each step, apply the ambiguity test: if you handed this step to a competent stranger with no additional context, could they complete it without asking a single clarifying question? Any step that fails this test is not yet atomic. Decompose it until every sub-step passes. Notice how many hidden assumptions your original steps contained — assumptions that work fine when you are alert and experienced, but that become failure points when you are tired, distracted, or handing the workflow to someone else.