The Financial Cost of Stuckifyed
And organizations pay it every day without knowing it
I was deep into the research for my book, Unstuckifyed: Why organizations get stuck and how to unstick them, when I realized, I could describe but Stuckifyed was, but could I quantify it?
And what do researchers do when they have a question? We go digging for answers…also known as research.
One Truth
There is a cost to Stuckifyed and organizations pay for it everyday.
Research from Bain & Company and IDC found that organizations lose up to 30% of their productive capacity to four things:
Rework - doing things more than once because they weren’t right the first time
Miscommunications - time lost to clarifying and correcting misunderstandings
Broken processes - delays and workarounds that eat up time and effort
Internal issues that shouldn’t exist - the fires, the politics, the friction, the performative theater that consumes energy without producing results
What does this look like in numbers?
According to McKinsey’s calculations, a typical Fortune 500 company loses roughly $250 million in labor costs every year to this kind of drag that erodes productivity.
What does this number translate to for your organization? To find out, multiply your total labor cost by .3, here are a few examples:
$1.5M in labour costs → $450,000 lost per year
$3.75M in labour costs → $1,125,000 lost per year
$7.5M in labour costs → $2,250,000 lost per year
So, there you have it, that is the cost of being Stuckifyed.
One Insight
What I find interesting about the cost of being Stuckifyed is how well it hides in plain sight. Rework looks like diligence. Putting out fires looks like business as usual, and showing up to meetings looks like collaboration. We don't flag these things as waste because they look and feel like work. Responsible, professional, necessary work. Which is how organizations end up simultaneously exhausted and unproductive. Everyone is busy. Nothing is moving. And nobody can quite explain why.
Insight into Action
Bring the hidden costs into the light.
One small exercise to try: Calculate your hourly rate, and then multiply that number by the number of meetings you attend in day, where no decisions are made, and no work is progressed. What does that number look like across your team? What might happen if you could recoup even half of that?
You can do this math for all the different causes mentioned above. But meetings are a good place to start.
Get Unstuckifyed
There is a cost to being Stuckifyed, and organizations pay it every day. What might be possible if you could recoup even half of that?
Till Next Time
Stuckness has always been expensive. We just never saw the bill.
Thanks for getting Unstuckifyed with me.
Dr Dani