The causal line

For every workstream currently running, write one sentence connecting it to the destination. Not a description of the work. A causal claim: doing this causes that, which moves us toward the destination in this specific way.

The exercise takes an hour and it is uncomfortable in a productive way. Some sentences write themselves. Some require three attempts and end up honest. And some cannot be written at all, which is the finding.

A workstream with no causal line is not necessarily waste. It might be maintenance, or a regulatory requirement, or something that protects against a risk rather than advancing a goal. Those are legitimate and they should be labelled as what they are. The problem is the workstream that everyone assumes is advancing the destination, that nobody can connect to it, and that continues to consume the organisation's scarcest attention because stopping it would require someone to say so out loud.

Write the lines. Put them where the people doing the work can read them. The ones that cannot be written are the agenda for your next operating review, and they are a better agenda than the one you would otherwise have written, because they came from the structure of the work rather than from whatever was most recently on fire.