You Don't Have to Fix Everything

A lot of operational problems sit in a waiting room. People can see them. They talk about them. They wait to fix them until the business is ready for a larger change: a new system, a reorganization, a program that will finally "get operations in order."

Sometimes that larger change is real. A merger. A new location. A system that cannot support the work. Those are not excuses. They are projects.

Most weeks are not that.

Most weeks, work is harder than it needs to be because of one process that already has a name: the intake that loses information, the schedule only one person can build, the invoice that waits on a copy-and-paste, the handoff that sits between two people. Those do not require a program that touches every department. They require someone to treat one process as worth finishing.

The mistake is treating a broad transformation as the automatic response to every operational problem. You do not have to remake the whole business before you are allowed to improve one process.

In a 1992 Harvard Business Review article, Robert Schaffer and Harvey Thomson described an auto-parts plant that ran involvement meetings for six months. People offered hundreds of suggestions. Quality and delivery barely moved. Management then asked one line to cut its most common defect by 30 percent in two months. The line hit the target, cut that defect again, and within about four months the plant's scrap rate was inside the budget. Same plant. Different scope. The scope was specific—one defect on one line—and the result was visible in weeks, not years.

That is not an argument against ambition. It is an argument against waiting.

Large, multi-year programs often fall short of their original ambitions. In McKinsey's 2021 survey of more than 1,000 people who had been part of a transformation, fewer than one in three said the effort both improved performance and made the improvement last. That is not proof that big change is a bad idea. It is a reminder that increasing the scope also increases the complexity of the change, and makes it easier to spend a year without anyone's Tuesday getting easier.

You can improve a process while a larger decision is still open. You can fix how a job moves from request to schedule without replacing every tool. You can make one handoff reliable without rewriting how the company is organized.

If you need the large change, do it. If you do not, stop using it as the price of admission.

You do not have to fix everything to make something meaningfully better. Start with one process you can see. Finish an improvement you can judge. Then decide what is next from a better week, not from a waiting room.