Based on patterns observed across real organisations
Late afternoon, the detective sits quietly in a busy office, watching the work unfold.
An employee completes a task and clicks “submit.” Then they wait.
Across the room, a colleague finishes their part of a process and places the file in a shared folder. It sits there. Minutes pass. Then hours.
In another team, a request has been sent for approval. It has been marked as “urgent,” but it has already been two days. No response. No update.
A meeting is scheduled to move things forward. It starts ten minutes late while people join, reconnect, and catch up on what they missed.
By the end of the day, plenty of work has been started. Very little has actually moved on.
No one questions it. This is just how the system works.
What you are seeing here is Waiting Waste, one of the 8 wastes in Lean (TIMWOODS), where time is lost because people, information, or work are not ready when needed.
If you’re new to the 8 wastes, this case links back to the bigger picture explored in our series introduction blog post here.
The Scene: When Time Slips Through the Gaps
In many organisations, waiting is invisible.
Work appears to be progressing. Tasks are completed. Emails are sent. Systems are updated.
But between each step, there are gaps. Small pauses. Delays that seem insignificant on their own, but quickly add up.
In one organisation, approvals regularly sat in inboxes for days because decision-makers were in back-to-back meetings. In another, teams were dependent on a single individual to move work forward, creating bottlenecks whenever that person was unavailable. In yet another, processes were designed in such a sequential way that each stage had to wait for the previous one to fully complete, even when some tasks could have run in parallel.
Nothing is technically “stuck.”
But nothing is flowing either.
Because every delay, whether it is seconds, minutes, or days, extends lead times, slows delivery, and creates frustration for everyone involved.
Clues: Where to Look for Waiting Waste
Waiting waste occurs whenever work is delayed due to a lack of availability, information, or flow. It is often hidden between process steps rather than within them.
You are likely to see it in places like these:
- Work sitting in queues between stages with no clear ownership
- Approvals taking longer than expected due to availability or prioritisation
- Tasks delayed because information, materials, or inputs are not ready
- Bottlenecks where one person or team becomes a dependency for progress
- Meetings that start late, overrun, or fail to move work forward
Anywhere work is paused when it could be progressing, waiting waste is likely present.
Interrogation Questions: How to Spot It in Your Process
To uncover waiting waste, you don’t need to time every task, you need to look between the tasks and see where work pauses without reason.
Start with questions like:
- How long does work spend sitting idle compared to how long it is actively being worked on?
- Where are the most common points of delay; approvals, inputs, system access, or availability?
- Are tasks arranged sequentially out of habit, even though some could run in parallel?
- What mechanisms exist to flag and address stalled work before it becomes a backlog?
These questions shift the focus from “How long does this task take?” to “How long does this process take?”
The Verdict: What’s Really Going On
Waiting waste is rarely caused by a lack of effort. In most cases, people are busy, systems are active, and work is constantly being completed.
The issue lies in how the process is designed.
Over time, dependencies build up. Approvals are added. Responsibilities become concentrated in specific roles. Systems are introduced that do not quite align with one another.
The result is a process that looks productive on the surface but is slowed by hidden delays throughout.
Across organisations, the same pattern emerges: work spends more time waiting than it does being worked on.
As we close the file on The Case of the Missing Time, the trail does not lead to individuals being unproductive, it leads to the gaps between the steps, where time quietly slips away.