By Helen Butler, Simplified Operations
One of the things that fascinates me about businesses is how rarely operational problems start because of one obvious moment. We often imagine them appearing after a specific situation – a surge in demand, a less-than-ideal hire or a new system being introduced. In reality, it’s usually far less obvious than that.
Most businesses drift off course slowly, through dozens of small decisions that felt perfectly reasonable at the time.
I often hear the early signs of this when sitting with leadership teams. Someone might mention that things seem to take longer than they used to, or that the team has had to deal with an issue that feels suspiciously similar to the one they handled last month. The comment usually comes with a sensible explanation, everyone confirms it was dealt with, and the meeting moves on.
Those moments always make me pause, because they’re rarely about one isolated issue. More often they are early signals that the business has started quietly working around problems rather than fixing them.
Individually those decisions don’t feel significant. In fact, they usually seem entirely reasonable in the moment. But when they happen repeatedly they begin to shape how the organisation actually operates. What started as a workaround gradually becomes the normal way of doing things.
Before anyone really notices, the business is running in a way nobody intentionally designed – and it comes at a cost. Time gets lost, margins quietly shrink and teams end up working harder than they should have to.
This pattern is common in successful, growing businesses. The leadership team is capable, people care about doing good work and the organisation has often grown precisely because the team is responsive and adaptable. But growth brings complexity. More customers, more people and more moving parts inevitably place pressure on the systems and habits that once worked perfectly well.
In that environment the focus naturally shifts towards the next opportunity or the bigger operational challenge that needs solving, and small issues rarely feel urgent enough to stop everything and address them properly.
Over time those small compromises accumulate.
Research by McKinsey suggests organisations can lose as much as 20-30% of productive capacity to what they describe as “organisational friction” – the small operational irritations that nobody quite deals with until they quietly become part of how the business runs.
In other words, the business slowly absorbs the problem.
The uncomfortable part is that fixing it usually requires doing something that feels completely counter-intuitive when the business is busy: stopping.
Stopping to look properly at something that isn’t working
Stopping to reset expectations with the team.
Stopping to deal with an issue everyone has quietly been working around.
When orders need shipping and customers need responding to, it’s understandable that pausing can feel like the last thing the business can afford. But it’s often the only way the drift stops.
One question I encourage leadership teams to introduce into their meetings is simple:
“What are we currently working around instead of fixing?”
It’s a deceptively powerful question. It quickly surfaces the recurring issue everyone has learned to live with, the delay that keeps appearing on projects, or the workaround that has quietly become normal practice.
Address those things early and the business stays clear and consistent. Leave them unresolved for long enough and they eventually become the way the business operates.
Businesses rarely lose their standards overnight. They lose them a little at a time.
Does this feel familiar but you’re unsure where to start? Get in touch – we’d love to help.
www.simplifiedoperations.co.uk