Marcia's Leadership Q and As: Assume: Your Waste & Complexity is 50-80%! Now What?

Q. In a recent speech, you shared that most organizations that decline have complexity and waste. How do we detect that waste and rid our companies of it?

A. Leaders (and the natural leaders in your business—that’s everyone) become sleuths! Most organizations ooze with complexity. The job is to find it and remove it. The biggest obstacle is that people in their workplaces have become used to “the way it is,” “the way we’ve always done it here,” “the status quo,” and “everyone’s busy.” Busyness and micromanaging is not productive. Working long hours every day is not healthy.

Be a detective. Think about the flow of work, information, and the communication needed to move from the Customer order to delivering it. If you walked the “order from the first sale through your process, how long would it take? But then how long does it really take as the order tries to wind its way through your business? Would your customers wait? Would they be on hold? Would they receive immediate tech support? These are the measures that are critical and essential. Improving these measures can improve your bottom line.

Ask your customers, your community, your vendors, your employees where there is waste and complexity. They know! And they can help you detect it and rid your organization of it—to a degree.

A deeper dive to find the root causes of the complexity requires an outside perspective. Why? You are all in the system together. You don’t know what you don’t know. You want to improve, but mere improvement will not be enough, fast enough. You’ll need to STOP doing much of what you are doing the way you’re doing it. Innovate. Innovation means taking new ideas to market—and creating new markets. Create better, bolder methods to tie what you want to deliver (goods and services) to customers.