If I asked five people at your company how work gets done, would I hear the same answer?
Most of the time, I’d hear five versions, and almost always a “well… it depends,” and a pause. That pause is invisible work: the chasing, the workarounds, the steps that only live in someone’s head.
Most of it hides BETWEEN people and steps. I make it visible, so you know what to fix FIRST and make it stick.
“It’s amazing how a ‘simple’ process can actually be incredibly complex.”
You built something that works. It just got harder to run.
Does it still run when you’re not there?
Maybe everything still flows back through you, or approvals happen when someone catches you in the hallway. You take a week off, and the questions find you anyway.
Would everyone describe it the same way?
Your sales team probably has a process, and so does the team that delivers the work. But ask how a new client gets handed from one to the other, and you might hear three different versions, depending on who’s working that day.
Does the next person have what they need?
Sometimes a project starts before the scope is complete. Someone spends the morning chasing an answer or re-entering data, and before long, your client feels the wait too.
$12,506
per employee, every year
That’s what poor communication costs a business, by one estimate. Much of it is invisible work: chasing answers, redoing steps, waiting on a decision.
Source: Grammarly Business and The Harris Poll, State of Business Communication, 2023.
This is what visible looks like.
Every step and every handoff on the wall. Sticky notes where the work stops. The whole team looking at the same picture.
“Our workflow has become the defining resource for when a team member has questions on what happens next or who is responsible for taking the next action.”
How it works
Business Audit
Four 60-minute virtual sessions
We follow the work through your business together and score it. You walk away with your operation on one page and the three things worth fixing first, ranked by their impact on time, money and your clients.
“He has an amazing knack of being able to glean our entire process from a quick and painless interview, then visualize it in a way that we could never have done on our own.”
Strategy Workshop
One or two days in person
Your team comes into the room and names the pain points together. The bottlenecks, breakdowns and blind spots come from the people doing the work, and the common themes point to the root causes. Then the team force-ranks where to start by effort and impact, so there’s buy-in from the start. You leave with an operational blueprint, an owner at every handoff, and a roadmap.
“We had our eyes wide open within our first hour of Day 1.”
Implementation
Six months
We work through your top three issues on a weekly cadence. Standards get built and your team is held accountable. As the new way becomes simply how your team works, we keep working through your roadmap.
“He is still holding us accountable through the next steps.”
“He didn’t lecture. He facilitated. He let our team hear themselves think out loud, then held up a mirror.”
G Paul Hess · D-Tools
I’m Jason Sayen, a Process Architect.
I learned how work should move from one step to the next walking the factory floor at a large speaker and electronics manufacturer, where I first saw Lean in action. More than 30 years inside growing companies later, I'm a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt who has helped more than 100 companies see where their work gets stuck.
Read the story →Do you know what to fix FIRST?
Let’s have a 30-minute conversation about where work gets stuck in your business.