Organisations dropping tasks

This is a bit of an extreme idea, but hear me out.

It’s the norm today that companies optimise for time so much they routinely drop tasks. There are queues, support tickets that go stale, projects that never ship. We see it in our daily lives as well, the todolist just grows, the home renovation is never complete.

We’re so used to this, it feels normal. It feels like this is the way it has to be.

But is that true?

Isn’t a company dropping tasks, or not shipping a project, a sign of poor management? Or bad company culture? No barista would ever be allowed to routinely forget about coffee orders. Why are we ok with a telco doing something similar?

We don’t see a hairdresser “never quite finishing”. Why is it ok if it’s a builder?

I think we’ve optimised for productivity so long, that we’ve forgotten that busy isn’t the goal. Output is. And as a follow on effect, that means we’re optimising our companies to be at 105% effort all the time. Not shipping the project.