The work in your business doesn't move the way your org chart says it does.
Operations.
The Flow Unit
Could you name the one thing that has to travel all the way through your business before anyone gets paid — the order, the patient, the claim, the candidate — and then, without looking anything up, count every pair of hands it passes through on the way?
Almost every business owns a diagram of itself, and almost every one of them is the wrong diagram. The org chart is a picture of reporting lines: it shows who answers to whom, and it has never once shown where the work sits still. The alternative arrived in 1921, when Frank and Lillian Gilbreth put a paper to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers called Process Charts, subtitled First Steps in Finding the One Best Way to Do Work. Frank had started as a bricklayer's apprentice and couldn't stop noticing that no two bricklayers laid brick the same way; Lillian took her doctorate at Brown in 1915 and kept insisting the human being stayed in the frame. Their move was small and permanent: stop following the worker, follow the thing being worked on. Pick one unit — a brick, a form, a patient — and chart what happens to it, in order. The notation that grew out of that paper settled into five marks: operation, transport, inspection, delay, storage. Only the first is work a customer would knowingly agree to pay for.
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