What is the thing that goes wrong every single week?

Walk into your office and ask three people what goes wrong every week. You will get the same answer from all three, within two seconds, without anybody needing to think.

That speed is the interesting part. Everybody knows. It has been the same problem for a long time. And it is still there.

Why the familiar ones survive

Because they are survivable. The business has built a way around it, usually involving somebody doing extra work quietly, and that workaround is now invisible.

Because they are never urgent on any particular day. Each week it costs two hours, which is annoying but never bad enough to stop everything for.

And because they are nobody's. The problem sits between two people or two departments, so neither owns it, and anything owned by nobody does not get fixed.

Meanwhile it has cost you a hundred hours a year for several years and nobody has ever added that up.

How to actually clear one

Take the one everybody named. Put a name against it, one person, not a committee. Give them a date.

Ask them to do one thing first: watch it happen once, properly, from start to finish, and write down where it actually breaks. Not where people say it breaks. There is usually a difference, and the difference is why previous attempts failed.

Then fix that one point. Not the whole process. One point.

Businesses that clear one of these a quarter are unrecognisable in two years, and nobody can point to the big thing that changed, because there was not one.

Ask three people in your office tomorrow. If all three say the same thing, you have found what to fix next.

Taking one of these off a business for good, properly rather than for a month, is the kind of job we like most. Tell us what your three people would say and we will tell you how we would approach it.