The hidden micro-steps that create rework

Clare Mayell
Dec 17, 2025
2 min read

Most rework in businesses isn’t caused by big failures or obvious mistakes.

It comes from tiny steps that no one has properly named.

They’re the micro-steps that sit quietly in someone’s head, on a piece of paper or buried inside a routine everyone assumes is understood. Easy to miss. Easy to gloss over. Easy to forget.

And when those steps are missed, work doesn’t stop.

It just comes back again.

“We don’t really have a process”

I was working with a client recently who told me they didn’t really have a sales process.

We talked through how enquiries came in, what usually happened next and how visits were booked. On the surface, it all sounded fairly straightforward.

Then, right at the end of the conversation, someone said, almost in passing, “What about the whiteboard?”

It sounded like an add-on.

It wasn’t.

The whiteboard wasn’t the process

That whiteboard turned out to be doing a lot of heavy lifting.

It was being used to:

qualify whether a lead should become a live enquiry
capture key information needed later
trigger process checks, like whether a 48-hour reminder had been sent
signal that a first visit should be booked

Everyone thought the process was simply “add to the whiteboard”.

In reality, the board was just the mechanism sitting inside a much bigger process that no one had fully defined.

When micro-steps stay hidden

Because the whiteboard was manual and a bit muddled, a few things started to happen.

Important checks were easy to miss.

People weren’t always clear whether something was still a lead or already a live enquiry.

Data risked being duplicated.

Tasks bounced back when something hadn’t quite been done.

No one was doing anything wrong.

But the micro-steps weren’t visible, so people filled in the gaps differently.

That’s how rework creeps in.

Rework doesn’t look dramatic

This kind of rework is subtle.

Things still move forward, but more slowly

than they should. People double-check. Questions get asked again. The same fixes get repeated.

From the outside, it looks like everyone is busy and pulling their weight. Inside, it feels frustrating and inefficient.

That’s what hidden micro-steps cost.

Making the steps visible

The fix wasn’t about adding more tools or more forms.

The first step was agreeing what the process actually was:

when a lead becomes a live enquiry
which steps belong before that point and which come after
what information is needed, and when
which checks genuinely matter

Only then did we design a digital board that reflected the real flow of work, not just the informal tracking before.

The board was reviewed. Key details were placed at the right step. Ownership became clearer. Reminders were triggered deliberately, not left to memory.

Once the steps were visible, the rework dropped away.