You cannot expect what you don't inspect. This is a quote often attributed to W. Edwards Deming, known as the father of the quality movement and lean manufacturing. Over the years I’ve often taken principles I’ve learned from working and applied them to my personal life. Like attempting to always arrive with common sense. Because not many people do. And then applying that common sense vigorously to the situation. Sometimes this still has to be at the conscious level because a problem is difficult to figure out, other times I would like to think that I just automatically apply these things. Deming is often quoted too as saying that you can’t inspect quality into things. I really like that because in my experience, that’s the very thing that a lot of auditors do and it’s also why people tend to dread audits. If you are looking to solve a problem or fix something, however, taking a closer look and considering it may just be exactly what you need.
The Closer You Look, the More There Is to Fix
This is not one of those posts where I wax lyrical about a small business who finally figured out why people were abandoning their carts. They caught an error that had been happening silently blah blah blah. Let’s not. Let’s go a bit simpler. I’ll tell you about a problem that I haven’t solved yet, even though I know the solution to it. A problem that I have consciously decided not to do anything about. Because when you see too much detail it can become overwhelming and a problem can suddenly become impossible looking. The mole hill becomes a mountain.
My car always looks dirty. Sure, there’s road grime that builds up. Brake dust coats the wheels. The rain dumps fine sand particles from the Sahara onto it from time to time. When I was a young man, I would watch my Dad get a bucket of water, a household sponge and some washing up liquid and wash his car. Three terrible ideas mixed into one. A single bucket means you’re “washing” with dirty water after a while, a household sponge is too coarse, and washing up liquid can damage paint. When I first started driving, I did the same. I quickly learned that is a great way to introduce swirls into the paintwork and ultimately damage your car over time. The alternative? Go full on detailer, foam cannon contactless washes, polish applications, spend more time on making a car look good for a couple of hours than you would tackling bigger problems in your life.
Surface Detail Lies to Us
Before I stretch the car analogy to breaking point, let’s take a step back. Most of what we call "understanding" a problem is really just familiarity with the outline. We see the shape of something so often that our brain stops registering the details, the same way you stop noticing the hum of the refrigerator in your kitchen.
This matters enormously, because the gap between a glance and an inspection is exactly where money, time, and trust quietly leak out. A process that "seems to work" and a process that actually works under scrutiny are often two very different things. The closer you look, the more detail emerges. It's usually either an opportunity you've been missing or a problem you've been ignoring. It could be the difference between a well oiled machine and things breaking in unexpected ways that you should have really expected.
Like a lot of my writing, this isn't a new idea. It might feel new and urgent in a world of dashboards and automation but that’s because people don’t borrow ideas from elsewhere enough. Manufacturing has known this for a century. The entire philosophy behind quality control movements like Six Sigma and Toyota's kaizen approach was built on one core insight: defects hide in the details, and the details only reveal themselves under close, repeated observation.
Deming argued that most quality problems weren't caused by carelessness but by systems or processes that hadn’t been examined closely enough. Things looked fine from a distance but they weren’t.
Strategy has followed the same arc. Companies that once relied on quarterly gut-checks now obsess over the little things: time-to-first-click, cart abandonment by device type, customer service response time broken down by hour. None of these details are for decoration. They exist because zooming in will reveal things that will never be seen on the surface level.
Once You Start Looking, You Will See It Everywhere.
Most companies believe they understand their customer journey. Few have actually walked through it recently, end to end, with fresh eyes. The deeper you go (timing each step, reading actual support tickets instead of summaries, watching session recordings), the more friction points surface. Ones that had always existed.
A profit-and-loss statement at the monthly level can look perfectly healthy while masking bigger problems when you look at things transaction by transaction. I've seen teams discover that they were paying for three overlapping software tools that could do the same thing. The way they were using the tool for one thing "seemed about right" and the other solution was a natural choice. They assumed it couldn’t be done with what they had already.
When it comes to things like engagement surveys, nice tidy average scores can hide a lot too. Inspect more closely, department by department or even by individual one-on-ones, and you'll usually find one team struggling while others are thriving. The smoothness that the average suggests covers up the detail that you should really be solving for.
How To Look Closer Without Burning Out
You can't microscope everything all the time; that's a recipe for paralysis, not progress. Like my car, I know there are scratches in the paintwork and a paint correction would solve it. But there are more important things to take care of. When you see the detail you can decide whether the time and effort required to fix it will mean anything. My car might look clean but the garden will still be full of weeds. As my father-in-law would say “You wouldn’t notice it from the back of a galloping horse.” I can give my car a two-bucket wash and remove a significant amount of dirt without having to correct the paint. Clean wheels make a big difference. This is the Pareto Principle in action, 20% of the effort will fix 80% of the problem. The car looks cleaner, despite the scratches I know are there. I’ve decided they can stay, they’re a problem for a different day. Then there’s time for the lawns and the entire house looks nicer when someone walks by. Not to mention a happier wife.
So you see, you have to balance the double-edged sword of seeing ALL of the detail with being able to see the details that are causing the biggest pain. Fix the big problems, leave the smaller ones for later.
You can try this three-step approach:
- Pick one thing (a process, a system, the loose floorboards) per quarter to inspect deeply. Don’t try to tackle everything at once, just one thing a quarter: your onboarding flow, your hiring pipeline, your invoicing process. Rotate to another one next quarter.
- Use the "walk it yourself" rule. Before trusting a report or a summary, personally walk through the actual process as a participant would. Reports describe; walking through reveals. The concept of a “Gemba” walk is incredibly powerful, I will write about this again.
- Ask "what would I miss at a glance?" Ask this question deliberately, it will force your brain out of pattern-recognition mode and into actual observation mode. If you won’t see it from the back of your galloping horse, nobody else will notice either.
The Piece You May Be Missing
Here's what tends to surprise people: looking closer doesn't just reveal problems. More often, it reveals unrealized value that was sitting there the whole time, ignored simply because nobody examined it carefully enough.
The common assumption is that inspection is a defensive act, something you do to catch mistakes or pain points. But in practice, close inspection just as often uncovers an underused feature customers love, a process step that could be automated for huge time savings, or a small team contribution that deserves more investment. "Look closer" is not a hunt for flaws. Most leaders brace for bad news when they zoom in but I think that’s expecting something to show up when you inspect. You will be pleasantly surprised by how much good news can hide in plain sight too.
Fast Is Built on Detail
There's a tempting myth in business culture that moving fast and breaking things means staying at the surface, that zooming in is what slow, cautious, risk-averse people do. I would argue the opposite to be true. The businesses that move fastest sustainably are usually the ones that inspected closely early on, fixed the hidden friction, and built on solid ground instead of patching over cracks they never bothered to find.
The closer you look, the more you see. That's not a burden. It's an invitation, an open door to the exact information you need to get better.
So here's my question for this post: what in your life or business have you been glancing at lately, instead of actually looking? Pick one thing. Walk it yourself this week. Reply and tell me what you find, I read every one.
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