The work trace: follow one piece of work through your company

Ask a leadership team how work flows through their company and you get the org chart answer: clean lanes, sensible steps, a reasonable number of approvals. Ask the work itself and you get a different story.

A work trace is the simplest diagnostic we know. Take one recently finished piece of real work: a feature that shipped, a deal that closed, a hire that got made. Then reconstruct what actually happened to it. Every handoff. Every approval. Every day it sat waiting for someone. Every time it bounced back up for a decision that was supposedly delegated.

Count the handoffs. Then compare elapsed time to touch time: how long the work existed versus how many hours anyone actually worked on it.

What does a work trace usually show?

In one trace, a single feature had passed through 27 handoffs before shipping. Not because anyone designed a 27-step process. Nobody designs that. It accumulates: one extra approval added after something went wrong two years ago, one "loop in marketing" that became standing practice, one team split that turned a conversation into a ticket queue.

Three patterns show up in almost every trace we run:

The same one or two people appear in every path. Usually the founders. Not because they want to be there, but because ownership was never explicitly placed anywhere else, so everything defaults back to them.

Waiting dwarfs working. It is common to find a piece of work that existed for six weeks and was actively worked on for four days. The other five and a half weeks were queues: waiting for review, waiting for a meeting, waiting for someone to have context.

Nobody has seen the whole path before. Each person knows their own step and assumes the rest is roughly sensible. The trace is often the first time anyone looks at the entire chain, and the room usually goes quiet.

Why is this better than asking people what's broken?

Opinions about process are political. Everyone's answer defends their own step. A trace has no opinion. It is just what happened to one real piece of work, reconstructed from tickets, messages, and calendars, and nobody can argue with their own artifact trail.

That is also why we start nearly every engagement with traces rather than interviews alone. Interviews tell you what people believe. Traces tell you what the system does.

How to run one yourself

Pick something finished in the last month, small enough to reconstruct honestly. Walk it backwards from done to started. Write down every person who touched it and every wait. Count. Then ask one question of every handoff on the list: does this step exist because the work needs it, or because someone once got burned?

If the answer to the second is more than a third of your list, the problem is not your people and it is not your pace. The company has quietly built itself a machine for slowness, and machines can be redesigned.