Why Waste Thinking is Your Secret Weapon

 

The idea of waste thinking is straightforward yet revolutionary. It allows businesses to clearly identify tasks that aren’t valuable or necessary. Let's break down these categories clearly: 

 

• Value-Added Work: This is directly beneficial and valued by customers. Think delivering products, providing direct services, or problem-solving. The Reality is that value added work is less than 5% of everything you do when you truly understand it. For example, the moment you send a carefully crafted proposal to a client clearly adds value. 

 

• Non-Value-Added Work: These are necessary steps to facilitate value-added tasks but don’t directly add to customer satisfaction. Non-evaluated work is less than 25% of everything that you do every day at work. For instance, thinking through and preparing that proposal, quality testing, or packaging the final product. 

 

• Waste: Everything else—unnecessary activities that contribute no value at all. Interestingly, this waste often makes up more than 70% of the typical working day! Think about searching for misplaced files, waiting on overdue approvals, or fixing preventable mistakes. 

 

Imagine the potential boost in productivity, team morale, and cash flow if you could convert even a fraction of wasted time into value-added activities! Waste thinking operates on the simple yet powerful premise that incremental improvements, often just a two-second saving here or there, accumulate significantly over time. 

Like fish swimming in the sea unaware of the water surrounding them, we often fail to recognize waste because it's always been there, quietly limiting our potential. Most of us don’t understand these percentages and so we spend our time and energy speeding up the value added part of the work, which as you can see above is tiny. Lean thinkers / waste thinkers, look at the other 70% and spend all their energy on a eliminating waste in every process that you do. 

 

 

 

To tackle this waste effectively, businesses need to recognize common categories clearly: 

 

• Transport 🚚: Unnecessary email chains, excess walking, and redundant movements. 

• Inventory 📦: Proposals waiting for approval, customer orders stalled due to incomplete data. 

• Motion 🏃: Constant searching for files, excessive screen navigation. 

• Waiting ⌛: Delays in approval, response chasing. 

• Overproduction 🗃️: Excessive documentation, reports no one reads. 

• Overprocessing 🔄: Multiple revisions by various people, repetitive data entry. 

• Defects ❌: Errors leading to rework, miscommunications with clients. 

• Wasted talent🎯: Underutilizing talented individuals with routine admin tasks. 

 

By training your team to spot these wastes regularly, you not only foster a proactive improvement culture but enhance team accountability and performance feedback mechanisms that build a cohesive and empowered workforce. 

Over the past three years of working in our business – BizSmart Gloucestershire, my partner and I have developed waste thinking categories along these lines to help us see waste in our marketing, sales, coaching delivery processes: 

 

1. Stopping Flow 

2. Not Challenging & Learning 

3. Under Utilisation of Technology 

4. Under Communication & Delayed Feedback 

5. Defects 

6. Over Processing 

7. Difficult to Find Something 

8. Being Difficult to do Business with 

 

 

 

Sarah, the sales manager has stalled on finalizing a deal due to repeated legal reviews, a clear case of Stopping Flow. Meanwhile, Tom, the financial analyst, manually entered data into an outdated system, embodying Not Challenging & Learning by not advocating for more efficient software. In marketing, Jenny underused advanced automation tools, manually handling tasks that could be streamlined—a waste classified as Under Utilisation of Technology. Simultaneously, a delayed start to the weekly sales meeting due to poor communication caused Under Communication & Delayed Feedback, disrupting the workflow. Marketing released content with errors, a significant Defect, while Mike prepared an overly detailed report for a client who needed just a summary, resulting in Over Processing. Lisa’s afternoon was lost searching through poorly organized files, a frustrating example of Difficult to Find Something. The day ended with a client frustrated by complex pricing and contractual terms, showcasing how the company was Being Difficult to do Business with. 

 

 

“Fix what bugs you” is a core principle we encourage in businesses. Every frustration or repeated sigh from your team is a golden opportunity for improvement. Did someone struggle to find a file? Rename it and move it to a shared space. Does someone repeatedly draft similar emails? Use templates. Missed a payment reminder again? Automate the follow-up. 

These simple actions, repeated consistently, embed the concept of continuous improvement into your culture. And here's the beautiful part: it doesn’t require huge budgets or extensive hiring strategies. Just small changes consistently applied. "Just do it and find out," as I often encourage my teams. 

 

 

Transforming your business using waste thinking isn't a one-off exercise; it's a shift in culture. How can you integrate this into your daily rhythm? Consider these strategies: 

 

• Weekly Waste Check-ins: Regularly discuss waste identification and improvements in your team meetings. 

• Waste Wins Channel: Use a dedicated communication channel (Slack, WhatsApp, etc.) to share improvement videos / pictures and celebrate improvements. This is probably the most significant single thing that you can do in your business. 

• Quarterly SMART90 Planning: Embed waste reduction goals into your 90-day business planning sessions, making it part of your routine business execution. 

 

When leaders consistently reinforce these habits, they transition into the role of Continuous Reminding Officers, embedding improvements deeply into your team’s daily workflow.