Reading · Adrian Fleming · RSS Amplifier

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"We need a better system for this" is easier to say than "I've been putting off a hard call for six weeks."

The queue is not waiting on a system. It is waiting on someone to decide.

You do not have a workflow problem. You have a decision nobody will make, and a queue forming politely behind it.

Something has slowed down. Work is piling up, a stage is congested, things are taking longer than they should. And the operator does what operators are trained to do. They look at the process. They map the workflow, they hunt for the constraint, they consider new tooling, they redesign the stage.

It is a reasonable instinct, and sometimes it is right. But a great deal of the time it is aimed at the wrong thing entirely, because the queue is not waiting for a better process. It is waiting for a person to make up their mind.

OPERATORS SEE A QUEUE AND REACH FOR PROCESS

When work backs up, the operational reflex is immediate. This is a flow problem. Something in the system is too slow, or badly sequenced, or under-resourced. Find it, fix it, restore the flow.

That reflex exists because it is usually how operators are taught to think, and because process problems are satisfying to solve. They have a method. You can diagram them. You can buy a tool. You can show the team a tidy before-and-after.

So the operator reaches for workflow design, and feels productive doing it. Diagrams get drawn. Tools get trialled. And surprisingly often, the queue does not move, because the operator has been optimising the road and the actual blockage was a person standing in the middle of it.

LOOK AT WHAT THE QUEUE IS ACTUALLY WAITING ON

Go and stand at the blockage and ask a plain question. What, specifically, is this work waiting for.

Sometimes the honest answer is a step. A task, a handover, a resource. That is a real process problem, and process tools will fix it.

But very often the honest answer is not a step at all. The work is waiting for a direction to be chosen. A priority to be set. A trade-off to be accepted. A thing to be killed so the other things can move. It is waiting for somebody to decide, and until that decision is made, every clever process improvement around it just moves the queue a few feet closer to the same stationary person.

The bottleneck is not the workflow. The bottleneck is a decision, and the workflow is just where you noticed the symptom.

DECISIONS DISGUISE THEMSELVES AS PROCESS PROBLEMS

This is not an accident, and it is worth being honest about why it happens.

A process problem is a comfortable thing to have. It is nobody’s fault, it is just a system that needs tuning, and fixing it makes you look diligent. An unmade decision is a far less comfortable thing to have, because somewhere there is a person, possibly you, who is avoiding it.

So the organisation, quietly and without anyone deciding to, reframes the decision as a process problem. “We need a better system for this” is a much easier sentence to say than “I have been putting off a hard call for six weeks.” Building process around an unmade decision feels like progress and conveniently avoids the actual difficulty. It is procrastination with a project plan.

And no amount of that process work will help, because you cannot optimise your way around a person who has not decided. You can make every step except the bottleneck faster, and all you will have done is help the queue arrive at the blockage more efficiently.

FIND THE DECISION, NAME IT, MAKE IT

The fix is a question, asked stubbornly. When work is stuck, ask what it is waiting on, and do not accept a process answer until you have tested it. Keep asking “and what is that waiting on” until you hit something that is a choice rather than a step.

When you find the decision, name it out loud. Say plainly, “this is not stuck because of our workflow, it is stuck because we have not decided X.” That sentence alone changes the conversation, because it stops the organisation hiding behind a tooling discussion.

Then ask the two real questions. Who owns this decision. And why has it not been made. The answer is almost always one of three things. Nobody is clear that they own it. The person who owns it does not have the authority or the information to make it. Or the person who owns it is afraid of the trade-off and would rather it stayed blurry. Each of those has a fix, and none of the fixes is a new piece of software.

Make the decision, and watch the queue clear without a single change to the process.

THE REFRAME

None of this means process design is worthless. Real flow problems exist, and when you have one, the operational toolkit is exactly right. It means the operational toolkit is the wrong instrument for a decision problem, and operators reach for it anyway because it is the instrument they trust.

Your value as an operator is not only that you can design a clean workflow. Plenty of people can design a clean workflow. Your value is that you can tell the difference between a queue that is waiting for a better process and a queue that is waiting for a braver decision, and that you will name the decision instead of building elaborate machinery around the gap where it should be.

That is a discipline, and it is a different one from process design. It takes the honesty to look past the comfortable explanation and the nerve to point at the unmade decision, sometimes your own. The best operators build that instinct deliberately, or they bring in someone who will walk to the blockage and say the quiet part out loud.

Do that, and your business stops queuing behind invisible decisions. Skip it, and you will keep buying tools to speed up a road with a person standing in the middle of it.

Your bottleneck is rarely a process. It is usually a decision, waiting politely for someone to be brave enough to make it.

I created this Substack for business owners working too hard for too little return.

Each article draws on 30+ years as a business owner and angel investor to help you diagnose what’s really holding your business back, cut through the noise, make sharper commercial decisions, reduce avoidable risk, and act on the opportunities that actually matter.

Apply what you read, and you’ll stop confusing effort with progress. You’ll see your business more clearly, make better calls, and start fixing the problems costing you money, momentum and confidence.

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