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In the past year, rising interest rates and shifting market confidence have created a cost-conscious environment, pushing organisations to do more with fewer resources. Here's some places you can look

Photo by Daniel Malikyar on Unsplash

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Originally posted on the HYPR website by Daniel Walters, Feb 25 2025

In the past year or so, changes in market confidence and higher interest rates have led to a much more cost-conscious environment. Many organisations need to achieve more to compete, but have fewer resources.

In such an environment, many have already ceased operations due to the higher standard for ongoing funding. For many, this means demonstrating a path to profitability. Those who remain are still at risk of failing and, at the very least, must find a new path to operate more efficiently and focus on delivering value.

To complicate matters further, simplification offers organisations opportunities and risks. On the opportunity side, bloat resulted from companies’ liberal spending when borrowing costs were low and inefficiency crept in. This provides opportunities to focus on leveraging existing resources.

On the risk side, there is an industry trend towards short-term or overly simplified solutions that do not address what is truly needed. Vendors and service providers will sell you quick fixes and silver bullets. The problem with silver bullets is that their effectiveness is limited to the realm of fiction.

In response to recent trends of high interest rates and lower market confidence, most organisations have made cuts and cost-management decisions, introducing new challenges to their operations.

From this position, it can be challenging to envision how to compete successfully when, in the past, during an almost unprecedented period of low interest rates and high confidence, the answer was to add new roles and other investments to do more. The good news is that an opportunity exists to improve the organisation’s impact.

For executives to identify opportunities to continue improving their organisation’s ability to compete, let's first explore where organisations waste time and effort that could be harnessed to do more.

Where organisations waste effort and capacity

In the past, you may have rationalised that the payoff for adding more people outweighed other improvements. Still, it’s a great time to explore different ways to increase productivity in this reduced investment environment.

There’s a range of common ways organisations habitually waste effort. Understanding where time is wasted and assessing how much time may be wasted by each of these aspects in your organisation provides the opportunity to prioritise improvement efforts.

Here are some common issues I’ve observed in organisations and are likely to be present to some degree in yours:

• Politics

• Too many captains, not enough crew

• Context-free policies and decisions

• Unchecked quality decline

• Misalignment

• Comfort with non-achievement of outcomes

• Handoffs and delays

• Failure to correct course

• Trying to do too much at once

• Realising predictable risks

• False urgency

For each of these, we examine why this contributes to wasted effort and what we can do to address it. We then discuss how you can capitalise on these opportunities.