Take this with you
The four-question friction check.
Four questions your team can answer in one meeting, without preparation and without me in the room. Bring the people who do the work.
No signup. No email required. Print it or copy it into your own agenda.
In the last full week, how many hours did your highest-value talent spend producing a number instead of deciding with one?
Count report pulls, export reconciliation, and chasing a status somebody already knew. Ask them, do not estimate for them.
What you are looking for: the answer is almost always higher than the leader guesses and lower than the team feels. Both gaps are useful. Whatever the number is, it is capacity you can redeploy onto projects that earn. Whatever the number is, it is capacity you can redeploy onto projects that earn.
Take the last three things that shipped late. For each one, how many days was it finished but waiting on a person?
Not waiting on a supplier. Waiting on an approval, a signature, or one person to update one file.
What you are looking for: days where nobody was idle and nothing was progressing. On a sourcing move, every one of those is another day buying from the supplier you were trying to leave.
Name a decision your team made more than twice this quarter. Can a new hire find the rule written down?
Who buys the raw material. When an exception goes upstairs. What threshold changes the answer.
What you are looking for: if the rule lives only in somebody's head, it is not judgment. It is an undocumented policy, and it costs a meeting every time it comes up.
Of those three, which costs the most per month? Not which is most annoying.
Argue about the order until the team agrees. The argument is the exercise.
What you are looking for: most teams rank by irritation and then automate the wrong thing first. This is the question the other three exist to set up.
If you only do one of these, do the fourth. A ranked list your own team wrote is worth more than a better list somebody sold you.
Then route each one
Every item gets a destination. Most teams are surprised by how much lands in the last two.
- Fix the processThe handoff itself is wrong.
- Fix the dataThe number is somewhere, in the wrong shape.
- Automate itThe rule is clear and nobody needs to be in it.
- Leave it aloneIt costs less than removing it.
Ran it and want a second read?
Send me your ranked list. Fifteen minutes, no deck. If your order looks right to me I will tell you that and leave you to it.