Waiting & Non-Utilized Talent | Flow vs Friction Ch. 3

Bernadette Hill: Welcome to leanverse, where Lean thinking meets modern life. I'm, um, your host Bernadette Hill and I'm joined by my co host, Tatiana Sell. We're two lean Six Sigma black belts who spent our careers helping people and organizations simplify, improve and thrive.

Bernadette Hill: Our goal at leanverse is to ignite

Bernadette Hill: the desire for transformation and provide the tools to turn intention into action.

Bernadette Hill: Hi, welcome to leanverse, the new podcast where we explore Lean thinking in modern life. My name is Bernadette Hill and I'm

Bernadette Hill: a Lean Six Sigma black belt and a continuous improvement professional.

Tatiana Sell: Hi everyone, I'm Tatiana Sao, co host of the Lean Verse with Bernadette Hill. I'm a business operations and continuous improvement

Bernadette Hill: leader and together we geek out about all things Lean.

Tatiana Sell: Geek out on Lean Six Sigma methodology.

Bernadette Hill: I am joined by my co host, Tatiana Sell.

Tatiana Sell: Let's dig in.

Bernadette Hill: Before we begin, a quick note. If this podcast helps you see systems more clearly, subscribing, rating or sharing, it genuinely helps others find these conversations. Lean thinking spreads through visibility. So if you found value here, that small action alone helps more people encounter ideas that might improve how they work and live. Now let's continue our Flow vs Friction series. In the first two episodes, we explored defects over processing, overproduction and inventory. Forms of waste that show up in processes and compound quietly. Today we shifted to something more human waiting and non utilized talent. These wastes aren't just about inefficiency. They're about time lost and capability constrained and value that exists but can't reach the people who need it. Because sometimes the friction isn't caused by too much work. It's caused by work that's stuck or talent that's trapped inside a system that doesn't know how to use it well.

Tatiana Sell: Hey, Bernadette and Harry listeners, we're back. How are you doing, Bernadette? Awesome.

Bernadette Hill: Uh, Tatiana, I'm excited for episode three of this series.

Tatiana Sell: All right, so as you remember, in the past two episodes we covered defects over processing, overproduction and inventory. And today we are shifting to a new pair. A pair that feels different, but it's just as costly. We're gonna talk about drum roll. Waiting and known utilized talent.

Bernadette Hill: Thank you. You know, um, waiting for me is of the eight wastes is my worst, my personal worst waste. It's because I'm so impatient. I hate waiting completely. So I'm happy to share, um, my story today on waiting. But before we do that, um, one interesting detail about this pair is that non utilized talent was, was actually not part of the original seven wastes that Toyota Production System identified back in the 1950s. It was added later as Lean expanded beyond manufacturing into, you know, broader organizational contexts. Around the 1990s is when we added non utilized talent as the eighth waste. And this waste highlights, um, when organizations fail to use people's skills, creativity and capability.

Bernadette Hill: Mhm.

Tatiana Sell: Because despair is just not about process inefficiency. It's about time loss, capability ignored, and people waiting while value is trapped. So let's get into it. Tell me your story.

Bernadette Hill: Thank you for asking. Well, today my story is going to sound pretty familiar to most people. I wanted to share a story about, you know, sitting in a waiting room for a doctor's appointment. Uh, something I'm sure every listener has had to endure at some point in their life. Right now in this particular case, this appointment, uh, was not for me. It was for my daughter who was, um, who she started wearing glasses when she was really young. And at this point we'd already been seeing her brilliant optometrist for a couple years. Um, he's brilliant. He was incredible with kids and he really helped us align her vision when she was really young. She had kind of, you know, it was misaligned. So he helped us really align it when she was really young, uh, and helped us really understand how to get a four year old to wear her glasses, which was another challenge in its own right. I know I just started wearing these, uh, later in life, but yeah, it's a challenge. So, um, you know, he, he was such a great, or he is such a great doctor and really helped make what could have been stressful visits a little bit easier because we helped us understand our daughter's needs. But because he was such an excellent doctor, his practice was super busy. It was always just packed. Um, he was in high demand and appointment days were really brutal. Um, every visit turned into a three plus hour event and by the time my daughter was seen, we were already exhausted. She was cranky. And then whatever patients we had had going into the visit was, you know, was long gone by the time we were done. And after the first really hard visit, I did check in. I talked with the front desk, desk staff and asked, hey, could we schedule future appointments in the morning? Because what I thought we were, you know, experiencing was sort of that end of the day, you know, domino, um, effect that happens when every appointment just gets slightly later and by the time you get to the end, you're seeing patients an hour and a half past the original date. Right. Or, uh, past the original time. And so I Asked, you know, can we be scheduled earlier in the day? And I found out that their regular practice was always about scheduling kids at the end of the day because they needed to be dilated and so they wouldn't in dilation, as you know, because you're a glasses wearer, um, impacts your vision for a long period of time, several hours. And so they like to schedule the kids at the end of the day. Um, so I accepted that. And one of, after a particularly hard two hour wait, I went and asked the front desk desk staff when we were going to be seen and she kind of had these big uh, owl let me know. Unfortunately, Ms. Phil, there's been a mistake, you know, or Mrs. Hill, there's been a mistake. Um, we haven't, we, we didn't call her back yet to dilate her. Uh, so we're going to have to wait some more. And that moment was really rough. You know, I already said I don't love waiting. My daughter is young. Um, uh, and also kind of another thing about me personally, personally and professionally, I notice, right, because I know what to look for whenever I'm out in the real world. I notice when I'm in the grocery store waiting a long period of time, I notice when I'm waiting for food at a restaurant, I notice when things seem a little bit chaotic around me, right. In terms of the process. And so I couldn't help noticing that the system wasn't working multiple times, where they're late multiple times, we're there for multi hour visits. So you know, even at that point I realized that the, the visits without dilations weren't much better. We were just constantly sitting, waiting. But this time it was particularly egregious. Tatiana. But what stood out to me over time wasn't just the waiting. It was that nobody seemed to fix it.

Tatiana Sell: As, uh, you were living all of this, did you feel that anyone in the clinic, anyone in the middle, you know, kind of owning the process, felt oh, we need to do something about it or it was something that everyone just silently accepted, uh, from the, every

Bernadette Hill: individual in the waiting room to eve us, to the front desk staff staff and to the clinicians that we saw eventually it just felt like status quo. This is just, it was accepted as just the way that our operation works. And um, you know, as, and again he's a brilliant doctor. So I can imagine patients just thinking like this is just our regular experience that we definitely felt that way, wasn't happy about it, but that's what it felt like. Mhm. Yeah.

Tatiana Sell: I Can hear you. And I, I've been part of the acceptance as well. So I understand where people were coming from, but. Okay, time for definitions. Love this story. Thank you for sharing. Um, now let's define the two ways that showed up. We talked about waiting and let's start with this. So waiting through a classical, uh, lean definition. It is any time where people work or information, they are just unable to move forward without getting stuck in the process.

Bernadette Hill: Right. So where that waiting showed up in the optometrist office was extended delays with no clear signal of progress. Patients were waiting long stretches without knowing what would happen next. And then, you know, what we recognized was care was technically available, it just wasn't flowing. Um, and then the experience wasn't just slow, it was uncertain. And that uncertainty is often what makes waiting feel even worse and heavier than you would normally feel. I hate waiting, especially when I don't know if I'm the next one up. So that showed up there as well.

Tatiana Sell: It's anxiety inducing. I can totally see that. So now let's define the non utilized talent through a lean type of definition. It is a waste that occurs when people, skills, judgment or even experience, they are constrained by how a process is designed. Can you, can you give us, uh, an example, getting back to your story of the non utilized talent?

Bernadette Hill: Yes. Um, well, so for what we recognized or what we realized was that, um, the office was full of capable, well intentioned people. Everybody was nice, everybody did their particular job very well. But they were part of a system that wasn't necessarily working for the patient. Right. And so their expertise couldn't reliably reach us. The care was good once it happened, but the way that the work was structured made it feel really hard for their talent to show up consistently. And, and it wasn't like anybody appeared careless or incompetent. They didn't. Um, the issue was more about. The issue wasn't about individual performance. It was more about a, uh, system that limited how people could apply what they were capable of.

Tatiana Sell: I just love what you said about no one appeared careless or incompetent. That's what you said. This is fantastic because it's the classical process, not setting people up for success.

Bernadette Hill: Respect for people.

Tatiana Sell: Exactly. That was a great point. And thank you for illustrating the description, the definition. Apologies, the definition. Um, with this link back to the story. Okay, so definitions, we tackled that. So let's talk about why those two ways they matter. Um, they, I want to say that they don't matter just because they slow things down. Bernadette but they quietly change behavior, the impact costs, etc. Etc. It's all the conversation since we started with the series about how waste, they like to hang out with each other, they compound each other. It's the whole thing. But uh, tell me on your experience of why waiting matters for business, generally speaking.

Bernadette Hill: Well, so waiting compounds the process because it creates bottlenecks and slows the entire process. So when people, information or decisions, uh, are stuck, the flow breaks down. And this whole series is about friction and flow. So high friction, low flow rate. Right. Resources are sitting idle instead of adding value and that drives up cost. And when the system finally moves again, work often gets rushed to catch back up. And so maybe then you introduce quality issues, increasing the risk of defects like we talked about in our first episode in the.

Tatiana Sell: Yeah, there you go. So about non utilized talent. So let's layer that and why it matters. When people's skills and experience they aren't fully used. Time gets spent just reacting to problems instead of solving root causes. That's. Yikes. Um, also teams, they miss ideas, improvement, innovation over time. Guess what? People disengage and eventually they leave or they mentally check out. Do you agree?

Bernadette Hill: I totally agree. I, you know, these two ways to reinforce each other. Waiting creates frustration and firefighting because we're, now we're going to be, you know, somebody's going to be frustrated. They're waiting and now we're firefighting because we're trying to figure we're not figuring out the root cause, we're just throwing spaghetti at the, at the wall, trying to put band aids on the situation. Non utilized talent ensures that the same problems keep coming back because people aren't don't uh, feel safe or aren't asked to speak up about how they feel they could solve the problem. They may not even know that they have the power to solve the problem even if they have the ideas to do so. So those are two of the ways that they can definitely, uh, compound and impact each other.

Tatiana Sell: Yeah, that's true. Good point. Well, Bernadette, as we've done in the other episodes, we are not going to talk about tools on how identify waste. Uh, but here we're gonna just share with our listeners a little bit of the many ways that we can, uh, start reducing waiting and non utilized talent. Just to spark a few ideas, I'm gonna start first with weighting. Reducing waiting begins by identifying where the work gets stuck and a y. Bottlenecks are often visible if you look for where people or information pauses. Also standardized work and Automation, they can reduce variability that creates those delays. Improving communication between teams helps a lot to allow the work to move instead of sitting idle.

Bernadette Hill: And now let's talk about non utilized talent. One simple shift is just to ask people what are they capable of, right? Not just letting their current role dictate, uh, how they add value to the organization. Make improvements part of everybody's job or part of everybody's work. Not something that some special team has to do or that gets done at a certain time or frequency. It's just part of your everyday work. That's kaizen, right? That daily continuous improvement. And then create room for people to grow into their potential instead of locking them into narrow tasks that underutilize their skills.

Tatiana Sell: That's a good one. Uh, great, great point. But Bernadette, it's time for recap and reflection.

Bernadette Hill: And this recap is going to be powerful, Tatiana, because it's pretty simple. When work is stuck, look for waiting. When ideas are stuck, look for non utilized talent.

Tatiana Sell: Okay, okay. Let's see if I can bring a reflection that it's as powerful as your recap. Here's a reflection for this week. Where might ego ownership or theft protection be limiting how people contribute in quietly turning talent into waste? Sometimes, as we mentioned, constraint isn't the skill capacity or even headcount. Sometimes the real bottleneck is who gets to speak, decide or improve. Sit with that one and see you folks in the next episode.

Bernadette Hill: Another excellent reflection, Tatiana. We'll see you next week for when we talk about motion and transportation waste. See you next time on the Lean Verse.

Tatiana Sell: See you.

Bernadette Hill: Waste is rarely a capacity problem. Just like non utilized talent is rarely a skill problem. More often it's a system design problem. When work is stuck, it doesn't always mean there aren't enough people. When talent isn't showing up, it doesn't always mean capability is m missing. It often means the system isn't structured in a way that allows flow. In our final chapter of the Flow versus Friction series, we'll explore motion and transportation wastes and how unnecessary movement compounds the friction we've already uncovered. If this episode sharpened how you see systems, consider subscribing or following Leeverse on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. And if you're listening on Apple, a rating or review helps more people discover this content. If these conversations have been useful to you, sharing them helps others find them too. And if you'd like to go deeper, the Lean Mastery makerspace is now live inside the Savage Simplicity ecosystem.

Bernadette Hill: It's a free space for people who

Bernadette Hill: want to practice Lean, thinking beyond the tools to see systems clearly, reduce friction intentionally and create the conditions where talent can actually flow. You can explore it at savagesimplicityecosystem Circle. So, because life is hard, why not make it simpler? Leanverse is hosted by Bernadette Hill and Tatiana Sell. All episodes are programmed and written by Tatiana Sell and produced and edited by Bernadette Hill.