The waste in a business is almost never hidden in the sense of being concealed. It’s hidden in the sense of being familiar. Everyone walks past it every day, which is exactly why nobody sees it.

Here is the exercise I run in the first week of every engagement. You can run it yourself.

Pick one thing and follow it

Choose a single unit of work — one order, one invoice, one new employee, one support ticket. Follow it physically, from the moment it enters the company to the moment it’s genuinely finished. Not how the process is supposed to go. Where this one actually went.

Write down every hop: every system it was typed into, every person who touched it, every time it waited.

The five questions

At every hop, ask:

  1. Where did this information come from?
  2. Was it already written down somewhere else?
  3. What happens if this step is done wrong?
  4. Who checks it, and how would they know?
  5. What are you doing while you wait?

Question two is the knife. Almost everything painful in an operation is the same fact being written down a second time.

Read the notepad

By Friday you’ll have a page that looks unremarkable — and that page is a map of your invisible work. Circle every hop where something was retyped. Circle every wait longer than a day. Circle every check that exists because a previous step can’t be trusted.

You don’t need permission to run this, and it costs nothing. If what you find surprises you, that surprise is the most valuable thing you’ll read all quarter.