On Time, and Still Late.

"The team's too slow to respond/escalate."

I've heard a version of this from more founders than I can count, usually just before I sit down with the team and watch the workflow in motion myself.

So, I spend time observing and conversing with the team because the first response is sometimes not the right direction.

I'm going to use a complaint process as my example, to show another stage in the phase that unearths the real meat on the bones for a business to suss out what is going wrong.

The complaint comes in. It's logged, same day, in exactly the way it's supposed to be done. Nothing about what I'm watching looks slow. So much for the "team is too slow" theory. ❌ It still takes six days to reach the person who could act on it because the only checkpoint between the front line and the person who can solve it, is the Friday Ops meeting.

If this sounds familiar, this is when it's you should ask: When does a complaint actually reach you?

If the honest answer is similar to "at the next scheduled meeting," you've likely got the same gap and, now you're clocking, it has nothing to do with how fast anyone on your team moves.

Most workflows get built to answer one question: what happens when a concern comes in? When folks are building, they tend to create a process or system to respond to a concern, not to create an efficiency or an opportunity.

💡 But if you shift the lens you're building from, you create systems and processes that are full circle and create an efficiency or an opportunity, not just solve the concern. It's not unique to complaints, either - onboarding, invoicing, hiring - any handoff will do the same thing if nobody's considered what should be achieved at the end.

The complaint logging process didn't consider the opportunity that logging a complaint created. The opportunity to respond to a customer and retain their business. Therefore, the complaint logging workflow doesn't end when a task gets logged, it ends when the concern reaches someone who can actually do something about it. Otherwise, the loop is never closed, 🔁 and by the time it does get the attention of the correct person, it's too late and the damage is done.

Diagnose this as a person being slow, ❌ and the fix is a conversation about responsiveness, some coaching, maybe a reminder to "flag things faster." None of it will stick, because the person was never the bottleneck, and you'll likely end up with a disgruntled team member who knows, correctly, that they did nothing wrong. Diagnose it as an open loop instead, ✅ and the fix is an entirely different job: change when and how the information moves, and the six-day lag disappears regardless of who's sitting in any of the seats along the way.

Once diagnosed right, I would typically flow into the natural next question, that explores who is best placed to resolve complaints. Most organisations don't have the right people doing that work. But that's a redesign discussion for another day. 🔜

Once you know to look for it, open loops turn up everywhere. 🔁 Suddenly, you notice the client's payment pattern that shows up on a spreadsheet the day it starts slipping, but only gets reviewed at month-end leads to a drift compound that impacts your cashflow before anyone raises it, and what could have been a gentle reminder is now your shortfall. 📉 Or a quality issue that is noted, but only escalated when someone happens to ask, quietly costing you reputation or product quality before anyone upstream even knows there's a problem. ⚠️

There's a particular discomfort here, and it cuts differently to a documentation gap. "Nobody wrote this down" is easy to accept. "Everyone did exactly what they were meant to, and it still wasn't enough" has no obvious fix to reach for. It matters commercially all the same.

Every week an open loop runs unnoticed, you're absorbing the hidden cost of a workflow that was never completely designed, on top of whatever the original problem was already costing you.

DIY: Is this a person problem, or an open loop?

❓ Trace one specific issue from the moment someone first knew, to the moment someone who could act knew. How many days sit in between?

❓ Is that gap tied to how quickly a person works, or to a fixed checkpoint (a weekly meeting, a monthly report) that would produce the same gap no matter who held the role?

❓ If the same information had reached the decision-maker within a day, would the outcome have changed?

Once you’ve recognised the gap you’ve done the easy work; knowing what or how to redesign, and in what order, is a different, more difficult, piece of work that requires a bit of expertise.

✶

take care of you,

ZB.

Wi,Mi is based in Trinidad and Tobago and works with SMEs across the Caribbean and internationally. If your business is ready for that work, wherever you are, the conversation starts via 📋contact form, 📧 email hello@whatismustis.com or 📆 book a chat one time.