01 / 05

Here is a thought experiment we like to run with leadership teams.

From tomorrow, no process in operations is allowed to take more than one working day. The month end close, the buy, the weekly report, onboarding a new product, answering a customer claim. All of it, done in 24 hours or less.

Nobody expects you to actually run the company this way. The value is in working out what you would have to change to get there.

02 / 05

Most processes are mostly waiting

Look at any process that takes two weeks and time the actual work inside it. It is usually a few hours.

The rest is waiting. Waiting for a file from another team. Waiting for a person to be back from holiday. Waiting for the meeting where the thing gets approved. Waiting for someone to notice it is their turn.

The 24 hour rule makes all of that waiting impossible to keep. You cannot wait for Thursday's meeting if the process ends today. So the first thing the exercise exposes is how much of your calendar exists to manage queues.

03 / 05

The handovers would have to go

A process that crosses five people cannot finish in a day, because each handover costs hours even when everyone is fast.

So you would merge steps. One person, with the right tools and the right access, covering what three used to do in sequence. The checker and the doer become the same person, with the checking built into the tool instead of into a second pair of hands.

That question is uncomfortable because most handovers exist for a reason someone can defend. Control, review, four eyes. The exercise asks whether the reason is worth the week it costs, and sometimes it is. Often it is not.

04 / 05

The data would have to be ready before the question

You cannot assemble numbers inside a 24 hour window. There is no time to pull the file, chase the missing piece, and reconcile the two versions.

So the numbers would have to already agree, sitting in one place, ready before the process starts. The close can only end in a day if the data was clean all month. The buy can only be built in a day if the demand picture already exists.

This is where the exercise stops being hypothetical, because that foundation is buildable and some companies have built it.

05 / 05

What survives the cut

Some things genuinely need longer than a day, and the exercise finds those too. Negotiating with a supplier. Developing a person. Deciding whether to enter a market. Anywhere the time is spent thinking rather than moving information.

That is a useful discovery on its own. It separates the processes that are long because the work is hard from the ones that are long because of how they are organised.

Most companies find far fewer of the first kind than they expected.

We are not suggesting you impose this rule. We are suggesting you spend an hour with your team pretending you had to.

Write down what would have to change. The list you end up with is a fairly honest picture of where your operation loses its time, and most of it is more fixable than it looks.