What Bad Operations Looks Like From the Outside
A few weeks ago I was running late for my daughter's birthday party because a coffee order took twenty minutes longer than it should have. Not because anyone was being lazy or careless. Every single person behind that counter was working as hard as they could, the entire time I stood there.
The problem wasn't the people. It was the operation.
Twelve cars in the drive-thru. A line of people standing inside. Most of the staff focused on the drive-thru queue, because that's apparently where the metrics point. And on top of all of that, delivery orders were coming in through the same system, competing for the same hands.
This is what bad operations looks like from the outside: a system where everyone is working hard, nothing is actually broken in an obvious way, and yet the whole thing produces a bad outcome anyway. No single decision was wrong. The combination of decisions (how staff get allocated, which channel gets priority, how delivery orders get integrated) created a result nobody would have designed on purpose.
This is the thing about operations that's hard to see unless you're looking for it: most operational failures aren't failures of effort. They're failures of design, decisions made about how a system should work, often made one at a time, that interact in ways nobody anticipated.
The fix is almost never "work harder." It's usually: step back, look at the whole system as a system, and ask which piece is actually creating the bottleneck, because it's rarely the piece that's most visible.
Originally posted on Linkedin. Join the conversation here.
Hi5,
LD 🌶️
