Scaling Leaner: Four Operating Disciplines That Help Teams Deliver

Sumit Srivastava, Chief Digital & Commercial Officer, focused on the Future of Commerce, AI & Enterprise and Customer growth economics.

gettyLeadership teams are being asked to deliver growth while protecting margins, absorbing geopolitical volatility and competing for scarce skills in AI, data and cybersecurity.

On top of this pressure, boards are starting to ask a reasonable question: If technology and AI are becoming more capable, why is the organization not becoming materially more productive? The International Labour Organization found earlier this year that while AI has improved productivity at the task level, firms are still struggling to see measurable organization-wide impact beyond pilots.

Having led large digital, commercial and transformation organizations, I have found that many leaders look to talent or technology to solve capacity problems, but this is often the wrong starting place. Instead, many productivity issues stem from operational friction, such as when teams lose time finding information, reconciling priorities, navigating approvals, repeating manual work and waiting for decisions.

So the better question is: How do we deliver more and move faster without increasing complexity at the same rate? Based on my experience, four operating disciplines can make the biggest difference:

I have seen omnichannel organizations where commercial teams optimize revenue, marketing optimizes acquisition, technology optimizes delivery and operations optimize cost. Each function can hit its KPI while the overall customer or commercial outcome deteriorates.

Nothing will be solved in these situations by focusing on individual functions, as the issue is enterprise alignment. When the external environment is volatile, internal ambiguity becomes more expensive, so it’s crucial to align before costs rise.

Leadership teams need a common operating view across priorities, ownership, dependencies, customer outcomes and financial performance. This means more than another dashboard, as visibility only becomes useful when teams agree on what matters, who owns the decision and what action follows when a metric moves.​

When margin pressure rises, efficiency moves up the agenda. The mistake is assuming efficiency begins with automation.

Before automating, you have to understand the work itself. Which steps create value? Which decisions require human judgment? Which approvals protect the business from real risk? Which simply remain because nobody has challenged them?

Some of the organizations I have worked with had simple pricing or promotional changes pass through several teams, each rechecking the same inputs. In these cases, removing duplicate reviews, setting clear approval thresholds and assigning a single decision owner made the workflow faster without needing to automate.

The sequence should be simple: Remove unnecessary work, standardize what remains and only then automate where it creates measurable value. A poor process does not become effective because technology executes it faster.​

Many organizations struggle because, even if information moves quickly, decisions don’t follow. A customer issue may be obvious in the data, for example, but ownership remains unclear. A supply risk may be identified early, but addressing the risk is postponed until the next governance forum. ​

In one case, an omnichannel team identified an inventory issue almost immediately after it arose, but changing the underlying rule required agreement across commercial, technology and operations. By clarifying who could make decisions and agreeing upon guardrails, the teams were able to respond to the next issue when the problem appeared.

High-performing organizations make decision rights explicit. Teams know what they own, what requires escalation and what guardrails allow them to act. Governance should reflect the risk and reversibility of the decision.

Decision latency should increasingly be treated as an operating metric. Many leadership teams measure decision outcomes without understanding how long important decisions take. In volatile markets, that delay has a cost.​

​There is pressure to demonstrate progress on AI, but layering it onto existing processes without questioning the process itself creates limited value. A better question is: If we were designing this workflow today, knowing what AI can do, would we design it the same way?​

Often, the answer is no. ​That’s why AI is the fourth discipline, not the first. ​

I have seen this problem arise in a customer service team when solving a routine issue that involved identifying the intent, finding the customer and order context, checking policy, deciding the next action, drafting a response and then escalating if needed. Redesigning the workflow around AI allows several steps to happen together, with AI handling retrieval and recommendation while the agent focuses on judgment and exceptions.​

Beyond speed, redefining the process itself can remove handoffs and concentrate human effort where it matters most. However, AI also amplifies what sits underneath it. We need to be mindful: Automating unclear accountability scales confusion; automating poor data accelerates bad decisions; automating unnecessary work creates more unnecessary work, faster.​

Lean should not become shorthand for smaller budgets, fewer layers or asking the same people to absorb more work.

True operating leverage comes from reducing friction, simplifying workflows, improving the ability to make decisions and using technology to amplify scarce human capability.

Human effort should be concentrated where judgment, creativity, empathy and complex problem-solving create the most value.​

These disciplines reinforce each other. Shared visibility keeps teams aligned. Simpler workflows remove wasted effort. Clear decision rights create speed. AI can then add leverage.

The temptation is to cut costs here, add technology there and launch another transformation program somewhere else. A better response is to redesign how work moves through the enterprise.​

Instead of focusing on operating with less, the goal should be to create more value from every decision, process, capability and investment already inside the organization. For leadership teams, the question is simple: Where is friction still consuming capacity that should be creating growth?​​

Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?