The Complex World of Supply Chains and Process Efficiency

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The Complex World of Supply Chains and Process Efficiency

Podcast Episode · Process Debt · 05/09/2025 · 21m

If you’ve ever walked through a modern factory, you know the feeling: awe. Potatoes go in one side, perfectly golden fries come out the other. Not a lot of people. Not a lot of drama. Just inputs, standards, and a consistent, beautiful output.

Now think about your last quarter’s QBR. Same inputs, right? Customers, revenue, goals, risks. But the output? Different every time—new slides, new fonts, new “spin.” It’s like watching someone peel potatoes by hand while the automatic sorter sits unplugged.

Here’s the tension I keep running into: when humans can mass-produce something, we get scary good at it. When knowledge workers “hand-craft” the same thing over and over, we create chaos and call it creativity.

I once toured a fry factory where a camera caught off-color fries mid-air and literally puffed them aside with jets of air. No committee. No “quick sync.” Just a spec, a sensor, and a response. Inputs match the spec; outputs match the promise. Millions of times a day.

Contrast that with most teams’ QBRs. We accept “bespoke” as a virtue and forget that sameness—when it’s the right sameness—frees up the brain for the real work. Instead of arguing about layout and font sizes, we could be interrogating the story the numbers are trying to tell.

Supply chains are just agreements brought to life: standard parts, standard handoffs, standard quality checks. Knowledge work pretends it’s different… then trips on the same handoffs and misses the same quality checks, quarter after quarter.

When your inputs are repeatable (customer metrics, roadmap progress, risks, support volume) and your purpose is recurrent (a QBR, a renewal deck, a steering report), the smartest thing you can do is stop being clever and start being consistent.

Here’s a simple pattern that works:

1. Prescriptive Decide what “good” looks like explicitly. Make a one-page QBR form with the fields that matter: top 3 outcomes, top 3 risks, utilization, NPS, churn factors, next-quarter bets. Lock the definitions. If a metric needs a footnote, capture it once, not 14 different ways across the org.

2. Ritual Decide when and how you’ll do it—every time. Deadlines for inputs. Who fills what. Who reviews. Who owns the story meeting. Keep the cadence boring on purpose. The ritual is the muscle memory that makes quality the default.

3. Report Bake the “proof” into the ritual. Submitting the form auto-generates the deck (same layout, same chart slots), drops last quarter’s numbers next to this quarter’s, and flags variance. Marketing polishes after the story is true, not instead of the story being true.

Do that and you’ve basically built a mini-supply chain for your QBRs: standardized parts (fields), an assembly line (ritual), and an end-of-line inspection (report against last quarter). You’ll still have judgment calls—of course. But you won’t waste judgment on slide titles and chart pickers.

Two side benefits show up fast:

• Speed: When the format is a given, leaders spend time on implications, not interpretations. Meetings shrink because the story is already visible.

• Memory: Side-by-side quarters expose drift. You’ll see where a promise morphed into a platitude and pull it back to earth.

This isn’t anti-creativity. It’s pro-impact. Creativity should live in what you decide to do next, not in the spreadsheet gymnastics required to remember what you did last time.

Want fewer “surprise” escalations and more predictable wins? Treat your recurring knowledge work like a supply chain: define the parts, run the line, check the output, then iterate the spec—not the slide master.

Process Debt Truth: Every time you let a recurring task be bespoke, you tax the brain for style instead of substance, and that interest compounds.