Quick announcement before we jump into December’s Newsletter!
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These are practical tools to use with leadership teams to unblock decisions and move work forward. Email subscribers will get first access, including the downloadable resources.
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Now on to this month’s newsletter…
As we close out 2025, I want to share a conversation I had with a VP of Operations last month that completely changed how he thinks about his business performance.
We were reviewing his team’s key metrics when he mentioned, almost casually, “Our average time to resolve quality issues is about three weeks.” He said this like it was just a fact of life in MedTech. But then I asked him a question that made him think:
“What if your frontline quality engineers could resolve 80% of those issues in three days instead of three weeks?”
He paused. “Well, that would be incredible. But they can’t just make decisions like that.”
“Why not?” I asked.
That’s when we started calculating the hidden cost of waiting.
Theory
Most organizations track obvious costs: labor, materials, overhead. But there’s a massive hidden cost that rarely shows up on anyone’s dashboard: the cost of problems waiting to be solved.
When problems that could be solved in days take weeks to work their way through layers of approval, you’re not just losing time. You’re losing:
- Revenue from delayed product releases
- Productivity from teams waiting for decisions
- Quality from issues that compound while waiting
- Morale from capable people who feel powerless
- Competitive advantage from slow adaptation
This VP did the math. His team had about 40 quality issues in queue at any given time. Average resolution time: 3 weeks. If 80% could be resolved in 3 days by empowered frontline engineers, he would:
- Free up 320 hours of senior leadership time per month
- Reduce backlog by 75%
- Cut time-to-resolution by 85% for routine issues
- Save an estimated $450,000 annually in direct costs alone
That doesn’t even count the opportunity cost of faster problem-solving enabling faster innovation.
My thoughts
What struck me during this conversation was his initial reaction: “But they can’t just make decisions like that.”
That one sentence revealed the real problem. It wasn’t capability – his quality engineers were highly trained professionals. It wasn’t process – they knew exactly how to solve most issues. It was permission.
His system was designed around the assumption that problems need to escalate. But escalation isn’t problem-solving – it’s problem-delaying. And delays cost money.
Here’s what I’ve learned over nearly 30 years: every day a problem waits to be solved, it costs you something. Maybe it’s direct costs. Maybe it’s opportunity costs. Maybe it’s just the morale cost of capable people feeling blocked. But it always costs something.
The question isn’t “Can we afford to unleash problem-solving at every level?” The question is: “Can we afford NOT to?”
How to
Want to calculate your own “cost of waiting”? Here’s a simple framework:
- Pick one recurring problem type in your organization (quality issues, customer complaints, process improvements, whatever takes too long)
- Count how many are “in queue” right now waiting for decisions or approvals
- Calculate your average time-to-resolution from problem identified to problem solved
- Estimate what % could be solved faster if frontline people had clear decision rights and didn’t need to escalate
- Calculate the time saved (number of problems × time reduction per problem)
- Translate to cost (time saved × labor cost + opportunity cost of faster resolution)
The number is usually much bigger than leaders expect.
Call to action!
Before the year ends, calculate the hidden cost of waiting in your organization. Pick just one area where problems take weeks that could take days.
What would it be worth to unleash the problem-solving capability that’s already there?
Let’s make 2026 the year work flows faster!
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