Most inefficiency doesn’t look like a problem.
It doesn’t arrive loudly, or demand attention in a way that forces action. It rarely presents itself as something obviously broken. Instead, it settles into the background, absorbed into routines, reinforced by habit, and quietly accepted as part of how work gets done.
It looks like a careful handover. It looks like a sensible approval. It looks like diligence, collaboration, control. And because of that, it rarely gets challenged.
Over time, these patterns don’t just persist, instead they become embedded. Processes evolve around them. Teams adapt to them. Workflows stretch to accommodate them. What might once have felt inefficient starts to feel necessary.
That’s where the real cost sits.
Not in the obvious failures, but in the accumulation of small, reasonable decisions that taken together slow flow, dilute ownership, and quietly absorb capacity that could be used far more effectively elsewhere.
Why This Series Exists
In many organisations, there is no shortage of effort. People are busy. Problems are being addressed. Improvements are being attempted. And yet, the return often falls short of expectation. Not because the intent is wrong or misguided but because something more fundamental is harder to see.
The challenge isn’t always knowing that improvement matters. It’s knowing where to look.
Traditional Lean Six Sigma provides a structured way to identify inefficiency, most notably through the TIMWOODS framework which consists of eight categories of waste that exist in almost every process:
- Transportation
- Inventory
- Motion
- Waiting
- Overproduction
- Over-processing
- Defects
- Skills (underutilisation)
For those familiar with Lean, these categories are well established. For others, they can feel abstract – useful in principle, but harder to connect to the reality of day-to-day work.
And that’s the gap this series is designed to close, as we take our magnifying glass to shed light on the secret mischief these hidden problems can cause.
A Different Way of Seeing Waste
The Inefficiency Files take a slightly different approach.
Rather than describing waste in technical terms, each case in this series explores how it actually shows up – in behaviours, decisions and patterns that feel entirely normal in the moment.
There’s a deliberately light touch to how these patterns are presented. Not to reduce their importance, but to make them easier to recognise, discuss and question without defensiveness. Because one of the most consistent barriers to improvement isn’t a lack of tools – it’s the difficulty of talking openly about what isn’t working.
By giving these patterns a clearer shape, the aim is to create a shared way of noticing them. Not as criticism. Not as blame. But as something that can be observed, understood, and improved.
Your CQM Process Detective
Throughout the series, we take on the role of a Process Detective, your ally to spotting waste caused by hidden, and not so hidden, common problems that often go un-noticed or even ignored.
Not as an external expert arriving with answers, but as a guide to help surface what is already happening within your processes. We help you with the clues and interrogation questions, so you’re better equipped to unearth some of these challenges.
That means looking more closely at the moments that tend to be overlooked:
- where work moves, but doesn’t meaningfully progress
- where decisions slow down without improving outcomes
- where effort increases, but value doesn’t
It also means asking questions that don’t always get asked:
- What actually changes at this step?
- Who owns this outcome from start to finish?
- If this activity disappeared tomorrow, what problem would it really create?
These aren’t complicated questions. But they are often the ones that reveal where inefficiency has quietly taken hold. And importantly, this isn’t about solving the problem for you.
It’s about helping you see it clearly enough to act because the most effective improvements rarely come from outside. They come from the people who understand the work best.
The Inefficiency Files
This series is structured as a set of case files.
Each one focuses on a familiar pattern of waste – not as theory, but as something you’re likely to recognise in real situations:
- in meetings that feel necessary but don’t move decisions forward
- in processes where work passes between teams without clear ownership
- in systems that appear busy, but struggle to deliver flow
Individually, each instance may seem minor. Collectively, they shape performance.
Once you begin to recognise these patterns, they become difficult to ignore.
You start to see them in:
- the extra step that no longer adds value
- the delay that has quietly become expected
- the workaround that has become the process
And that’s where improvement begins.
Let the Investigation Begin
At the centre of every case in this series is a simple question: “Where in your processes does waste feel too reasonable to question?”
That’s often where the most valuable opportunities sit. Not in what is obviously broken but in what has been accepted.
The first file is now open: Case #001 – The Case of the Unnecessary Journey.