The Productivity Trap: Why Efficiency Needs Consumption

Why efficiency is worthless without consumption.

In business, we are conditioned to believe that "more" is always better. More leads, more output, faster turnaround, higher individual KPIs. We reward the person who works at 110% capacity.

But there is a flaw in this thinking.

If you increase the speed of one part of your business without ensuring the next part can handle the output, you aren’t creating growth. You are creating a backlog.

Efficiency needs consumption True efficiency isn't just about how fast you can generate work; it is about how effectively your business can consume it.

Consider a high-performing sales team that doubles its lead generation overnight. On paper, they are incredibly productive. But if your operations team has the same capacity as before, those new orders don’t result in revenue—they result in a queue.

While the sales team celebrates their efficiency, the delivery team is drowning. The result is not success; it is delayed projects, stressed staff, and frustrated customers.

The hidden cost of isolated speed When one department outpaces another, you create "Work in Progress" (WIP). In a service business or office environment, WIP is dangerous because it is often invisible until it’s too late. It hides in email inboxes, unassigned tickets, and spreadsheet lists.

This "unconsumed efficiency" creates:

• Bottlenecks: Work piles up at the hand-off points.

• Diluted Quality: The downstream team rushes to clear the backlog, leading to errors.

• Wasted Effort: If the backlog becomes too old, the work often has to be redone or updated anyway.

The Maru Perspective: Optimise the Flow, Not just the Function At Maru, we don’t just look at how fast an individual is working. We look at the flow of data between them.

If you have a superstar employee generating work faster than the system can process it, the answer isn’t always to hire more people downstream. Sometimes, the answer is to pace the input or automate the hand-off.

We focus on balancing the ecosystem. We identify where the "production" (sales, ideas, data entry) is outstripping the "consumption" (delivery, invoicing, execution).

Stop measuring isolated metrics A business is a single, interconnected system. If you optimise one part in isolation, you risk destabilising the whole.

Don’t just ask "How can we work faster?" Ask "If we work faster, can the rest of the business handle it?"

Efficiency without consumption isn't progress. It’s just waste.