Your team isn’t slow. It’s leaking time.
Eight ways work leaks time — Lean calls them DOWNTIME. Once you can name them, you can’t stop seeing them.
Your team works hard. The hours are long, the standups are full and everyone looks busy — and yet the thing that should take a day takes three. Velocity feels slower than the effort warrants. Retros surface the same complaints again and again yet nothing moves. If you’ve started to suspect the team is just slow, stop.
It isn’t. The time isn’t evaporating. It’s leaking — escaping through gaps you walk past every day without seeing them. And here’s the part that matters: the gaps aren’t a mystery. There are exactly eight of them, and they were named decades ago, on the factory floors of postwar Japan.
When Dave Brailsford ran British Cycling and then founded Team Sky, he didn’t chase one breakthrough. He hunted one-percent improvements everywhere — the bikes, the riders’ sleep, even the way they washed their hands to dodge a cold before a race. Stack enough of them, the theory went, and a country that had never produced a Tour de France winner takes five of…
