Flow Awareness = Waste Awareness ♻️

How much waste is hidden in your delivery ecosystem? Days? Hundreds of days? Thousands of days? You'd be surprised! 😳

Ideas can end up in four different states in your delivery system—each with unique implications for value and waste: 👇🏽

1️⃣ Discarded Ideas

Some ideas are terminated before they even start. This is called a discard: "The idea was discarded because it didn't align with our strategic direction."

In many cases, this is the ideal outcome. It saves time, effort, and capacity that would otherwise be wasted. As Peter Drucker once said: "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."

➖ Discard as much as possible, as early as possible. ➖

2️⃣ Completed Ideas

Some ideas successfully navigate all workflow steps and reach completion. Over their lifecycle, these ideas are expected to deliver the intended benefits.

➖ Completion is the ultimate goal we strive for. ➖

3️⃣ Abandoned Ideas

Sometimes, an idea is initiated but then forced to return to the backlog due to shifting priorities. This is called abandonment: "Priorities have changed, so we need to pause the new product," or "Initiative ABC is on the back burner due to situation X."

Abandoning work leads to waste as context is quickly lost, assets decay, people involved change, and the market evolves. This makes it highly likely that most of the work already done will need to be redone if restarted. It also fosters a culture of starting over finishing, leading to high work-in-progress (WIP), which brings many challenges.

➖ Abandonment is wasteful and should be minimized. ➖

4️⃣ Aborted Ideas

There are times when an idea loses market value while in progress and must be terminated. This is called an abort: the idea is started, capacity is invested, but it no longer makes sense to complete it. Unlike abandonment, aborted ideas have no intention of ever being completed. This makes them the most wasteful outcome—scarce capacity is invested, but no value is realised.

➖ Abortion is the most wasteful outcome and should be avoided at all costs. ➖

By tracking flow metrics like 'Discard Rate', 'Completion Rate', 'Abandon Rate', and 'Abort Rate', organisations can gain valuable insights into their decision-making processes and understand where value is being created or lost.

💬 Does your team measure these metrics? Imagine if you could reclaim the capacity equivalent to 22 full-time team members in a year—how would that change your outcomes? Let us know! 👇🏽