A great example of how rigid job descriptions hurt flow was on display at the airport coffee shop today. The shop was staffed by three people. One person handled order taking, prepared food / baked goods retrieval, and payments. The second and third persons handled specialty drink preparation.

There was a run of customers that only wanted coffee or coffee and prepared foods. That left the first person scrambling to serve customers while the other two did nothing. The predicable result was a growing line of anxious passengers and one very frustrated TSA agent who probably spent his entire break on line. The people working at this shop were clearly trained to do their jobs, but not trained to manage flow, and make keeping the line of customers moving a priority.

I’m writing this not to embarrass any coffee shop managers, but to suggest we always can be looking critically at the work of others to train and improve our own ability to observe flow and lack of flow. Then when we look at our own work with better trained eyes we may start to see things we had missed before.