The cost of doing nothing...

Public sector teams often continue with existing routines because the work needs to move and time to reassess is limited. This approach maintains delivery, but it also carries costs that accumulate quietly over time. These costs do not emerge as single events, but rather sit in the background of how organisations operate and gradually reduce what they can achieve.

Several patterns illustrate this.

🤹 Workload expands when new tasks are added without retiring older ones, leaving teams responsible for activity that no longer contributes meaningfully to current aims.

👩‍🏭 Demand is treated as fixed, and teams take on work that could be declined, consolidated or routed differently if the organisation examined where requests originate and how they could be managed.

🟰 Standards drift when expectations are not revisited, and the resulting variation in outputs requires additional alignment and clarification later.

🛝 Responsibilities adjust informally as priorities shift, creating gaps and overlaps that make planning and decision-making more complicated than they need to be.

🏚️ Legacy systems and tools steer behaviour, and work ends up shaped more by what the system allows than by what current objectives require.

🛑 Opportunities to simplify or discontinue work are missed, because attention stays on established routines rather than on identifying processes that could be redesigned or removed.

🦥 Decision-making slows when small unresolved issues accumulate, leading to additional clarification and exception-handling even when the work itself has not changed.

🗒️ Undocumented knowledge becomes a dependency, and the organisation must recreate understanding when people move on because key processes were never captured.

🫸 Capability plateaus when skills development is deferred, narrowing future options and concentrating responsibility in a smaller group than intended.

💥 Static progression signals limited opportunity and reduced ambition, influencing expectations about growth and affecting the organisation’s ability to retain or attract people.

These patterns are rarely the result of deliberate choices. They arise because continuing as things are feels more practical than pausing to reconsider them. Doing nothing may feel like the neutral option but it’s not – it’s often one of the most costly options. Over time, the accumulation of unreviewed tasks, informal adjustments and outdated assumptions becomes a significant part of the workload in its own right.