Waste
I hate taking a shortcut to avoid a traffic jam only to find myself in an equally bad or worse set of traffic. I hate missing a use-by date on some food and having to throw it away. I hate marking an item of clothing the first time I wear it. I hate forgetting to turn a light off when I go out. These unintentional, avoidable wastes sit within my brain and needle at me until I eventually forget them and move on. Wasted resources, wasted time, wasted work. I suspect I’m not alone in this feeling, though others may be more or less laissez-faire on the types of waste that frustrate them. Does anyone like their boss asks them to work late on something only to be told later that their work didn’t get used? Or the feeling of messing something up part way through and having to start again? I believe not.
When I talk about unintentional, avoidable waste I use those words with purpose. I am happy to accept intentional waste. Intentional waste is sometimes a judgement call. When tiling a kitchen, you are advised to order 10% more than the area needed to account for broken tiles and offcuts. When waiting for a plane I’m happy to arrive slightly earlier and to sit in the airport to avoid the rush of sprinting to a gate. When creating two options for a piece of work I don’t’ mind that one is discarded as it got us to an agreement on the other. Intentional waste still contributes towards value at the end – a tiled kitchen, a plane ride or an approved draft – and, though I’d prefer to reduce them the next time I did them, they’re a compromise towards an end goal.
Similarly, unavoidable waste is fine. Sure, it can grate slightly when you have to accept something at lower efficiency than you’d like because that’s how it operates but, again, it’s in support of receiving a value at the end, so I’ll live with it. It’s unavoidable that if you light a fire each night to keep warm, you have to go outside one day to take out the ash.
What I dislike intensely is the unintentional, avoidable waste that comes from mistakes, inefficiencies, failure to ask the right questions and poor quality control. These are all drains on delivering value.
Rework, confusion and dissatisfaction all result from unintentional, avoidable waste. Forgetting to proof read something before it is sent to a stakeholder means they will come back with more changes than if it had been properly checked. Delivering information in three different spreadsheet formats takes way more work to synthesize than if they’d been standardised from the start. Failing to deliver on time and not sending a note means extra chasing and more back-and-forth.
How effectively teams work together will determine how much waste they produce. Everyone should dislike the burden of waste because it is the opposite of what we should all turn up and work to deal with and adds nothing to the pleasure from our home lives. We should aim to extract and deliver as much value as possible to the people around us.