Most businesses are leaking time and money through inefficiencies they have stopped noticing. The first step to fixing operational drag is learning to see it again.
When a process has been in place for more than two years, the people running it almost always stop questioning it. The steps that were once clearly necessary become invisible habits. The workarounds that were introduced to patch old problems become part of the standard flow. This is operational drag — and in most organisations it costs far more than anyone realises.
What operational drag actually costs
In a recent engagement with a mid-sized retailer, we mapped their order fulfilment process end to end. What should have been a straightforward fourteen-step process had grown to thirty-one steps — seventeen of which existed purely to compensate for system limitations that had long since been resolved. The cost of those seventeen unnecessary steps, annualised, came to over €340,000 in wasted labour and delayed throughput.
This is not unusual. In our experience, the average operational process in a business that has been running for more than five years contains between 30% and 40% of steps that add no value. The challenge is that each individual step seems reasonable in isolation — it is only when you look at the whole that the accumulation becomes visible.
"Operational drag is not caused by individual bad decisions. It is caused by the accumulation of small reasonable decisions over time, never reviewed as a whole."
The three types of operational drag
- Process drag — unnecessary steps, approvals, or handoffs that slow work down without adding value or reducing risk.
- Technology drag — tools that are being used for purposes they were not designed for, or systems that require manual workarounds because they are not integrated.
- Organisational drag — structural or cultural friction, such as unclear accountability, excessive meeting culture, or communication bottlenecks between teams.
A practical framework for finding drag
The most effective way to surface operational drag is process mapping combined with time analysis. Walk through each core process in your business and for every step, ask three questions: What value does this step create for the customer or the business? What would happen if we removed it entirely? How long does this step actually take compared to how long it should take?
The answers to these questions consistently surface between five and ten high-impact improvement opportunities in any business we work with. The key is to do this exercise with the people who actually run the processes, not just their managers — frontline staff know exactly where the friction is, but are rarely asked.
Starting the fix
The most important principle in operational redesign is to remove before you replace. Organisations instinctively reach for new technology or new processes before they have eliminated the waste in their existing ones. In almost every case, a leaner version of the current process is faster, cheaper, and less risky to implement than a new one — and it creates the clarity needed to make better technology decisions later.