It has been our experience, in office hour after office hour, that people waste a lot of time working on the wrong problem.

Boston University professor Anita Tucker and I studied nurses carrying out the dozens of tasks that occupied them throughout long hospital shifts. Taking detailed notes, complete with time stamps, to document the work of these dedicated caregivers at nine hospitals, Anita observed that nurses confronted “process failures” surprisingly often—almost one an hour. A process failure was anything that disrupted a nurse’s ability to complete a task, such as an unexpected supply shortage in bed linens or medications. The nurses were acutely aware of these frustrating daily hurdles. Their jobs were hard enough! On average nurses were working an extra (unpaid) forty-five minutes simply to tie up loose ends before leaving the hospital.

In contrast, for 7 percent of the process failures, nurses engaged in what we dubbed “second-order problem-solving.” This could mean simply informing a supervisor or someone in charge of linens about the shortage. Second-order problem-solving got the immediate task done and did something to prevent the problem from recurring.

If you're preparing for significant growth, we recommend paying loving attention to even the small problems. Most organizations have an implicit 80-20 rule, a belief that 20 percent of the problems are causing 80 percent of the harm. The built-in assumption is that if you can resolve the big ones, you'll be OK. But an HBS colleague, AnitaTucker, has found that it's the small problems that often cripple companies. Small problems often don't get addressed, because they don't seem significant enough to warrant focus. But because they don't get addressed, they always require a work-around, and that work-around can consume 20 percent of an employee's day. People can spend 20 percent of their time on the job working around problems that will never make it onto the priority list to be fixed. Tucker conducted a study of a nursing unit and found that on average, each employee wasted one hour per day working around problems that could be fixed, but that no one deemed important enough to address. An hour every day. What could your company achieve if it gave an extra five hours a week to every employee?

If you're preparing for significant growth, we recommend paying loving attention to even the small problems. Most organizations have an implicit 80-20 rule, a belief that 20 percent of the problems are causing 80 percent of the harm. The built-in assumption is that if you can resolve the big ones, you'll be OK. But an HBS colleague, AnitaTucker, has found that it's the small problems that often cripple companies. Small problems often don't get addressed, because they don't seem significant enough to warrant focus. But because they don't get addressed, they always require a work-around, and that work-around can consume 20 percent of an employee's day. People can spend 20 percent of their time on the job working around problems that will never make it onto the priority list to be fixed. Tucker conducted a study of a nursing unit and found that on average, each employee wasted one hour per day working around problems that could be fixed, but that no one deemed important enough to address. An hour every day. What could your company achieve if it gave an extra five hours a week to every employee?