The problem is rarely effort
Most teams are not failing because the people on them are not good enough. They are failing because they are working very hard on work that does not create value. With demands stacking up and priorities shifting every quarter, it becomes easy—and frankly, addictive—to confuse activity with impact. People feel busy. They feel productive. And meanwhile, the work that would actually move the business sits, untouched, at the edge of an overloaded week. So when results lag, the instinct is almost always to ask people to work harder. That instinct is wrong. Effort is not the constraint. How that effort gets spent is.
The data on where the day actually goes is sobering. A large global study of knowledge workers landed on a single, uncomfortable number: roughly 58 percent of the day is consumed by what the researchers called work about work. Coordination. Status updates. Searching for information. All of it orbiting the job, rather than being the job.1 So the high-value work is not crowded out because people are not trying hard enough. It is crowded out because most of their capacity is gone before they ever get to it.
Where the time actually goes
The drains repeat. Across industries, across teams, across regions. They are structural, not personal. Meetings that update rather than decide. Approval steps that add delay without adding judgement. Cross-functional coordination with no clear owner. Reporting that consumes more effort than the decisions it informs. McKinsey puts a hard number on the management side of this. Cross-cutting processes—planning, budgeting, performance reviews—can swallow between 40 and 65 percent of management and overhead time.2 When most of the management day and most of the working day are eaten by the work around the work, what is left for the work that matters is the scraps. And the scraps are rarely enough.
Which is why a time-management seminar will not save you. Nor will another push for longer hours. Both treat the symptom and miss the constraint. The constraint sits one level lower—in how the work is designed. How people meet. How decisions get made. How information moves. And what the organization keeps doing out of pure habit. Loosen any of those, and capacity appears, without anyone clocking a single additional hour.
The opportunity is real and quantified. McKinsey research shows that organizations which successfully redesign how they work can see performance gains of up to 30 percent,3 the equivalent of giving every team nearly a third more capacity to spend on what counts.
The Capacity Operating Model
A one-time clean-up does not stick. The calendar fills back up inside a month, and the team is back where it started. Which is why Suzanne built the Capacity Operating Model. It draws on the proven bones of lean and agile, and it gives leaders something they rarely have: a repeatable way to free capacity and then defend it. Four phases. Used in sequence.
Target. Get honest about which work actually creates value, so effort can be aimed instead of scattered. This is the phase where teams stop confusing the work that moves the business with the work that simply fills the day.
Intentionally. Work on purpose, not on reflex. Redesign how people meet, decide, and collaborate. Strip out the low-value work that quietly accumulates by default. This is the phase where capacity is actually created—not through more effort, but through deliberate choices about what to stop.
Move Forward. Protect the capacity you have just clawed back. Then point it at high-impact work—the strategy, the innovation, the focused deep work that an overloaded team never has room for—and keep momentum on what matters, instead of letting old habits reclaim the calendar.
Evolve. Treat capacity as something to maintain, not fix once. As the conditions shift—new priorities, new tools, new people—the team keeps adapting how it works. That is the continuous-improvement spirit of lean and agile, and it is what keeps the gains alive instead of trading them back for the next round of overload.
Here is the discipline that most productivity advice quietly skips. Capacity is built through subtraction, not addition. And once it exists, it has to be protected, on purpose, or it evaporates. Working sustainably is not a concession to wellbeing at the expense of performance. It is the condition for performance that lasts longer than a quarter.
What audiences take away from the keynote
Create More Time is built for senior leaders and boards, operations and transformation teams, high-performers at risk of burnout, and functional and project managers. Audiences leave able to identify the hidden drains on time, energy, and team capacity, to reduce unproductive meetings and streamline workflows, to simplify communication and decision-making, to prioritize the work that creates measurable value, and to create genuine space for strategy, innovation, and deep work. They also leave with a way to protect wellbeing while improving performance, because the two are not in tension once the low-value work is removed. The takeaways are practical and immediate: leaders leave with tools they can apply the same day, not theory.
A diagnostic for reclaiming capacity
A short set of questions surfaces where a team’s capacity is leaking, and where it can be recovered.
- Can we tell the difference between our busiest work and our highest-value work, and are they the same thing?
- How many of our recurring meetings make decisions, and how many only share updates?
- What work are we doing out of habit that we would not choose to start today?
- Where do decisions stall or loop because ownership and information are unclear?
- Does anyone on the team have protected time for focused, high-impact work, or is the day fully fragmented?
- Are our highest performers showing signs of strain, and is the system, not their effort, the cause?
Bring Create More Time to your event
Suzanne helps teams stop confusing activity with impact and create real capacity for the work that drives performance, drawing on her Capacity Operating Model and the themes of her TEDx talk, The Myth of Doing It All. The keynote is available as a 45-minute keynote, a 90-minute session, or a half- or full-day workshop, virtual or in person, and can be tailored to your organization and audience.
Frequently asked questions
Q: Why do busy teams still fail to get the important work done? A: Because most of their capacity is consumed before they reach the work that matters. Research shows the majority of the day, around 58 percent, goes to coordination and the work that surrounds the job rather than the skilled work itself. The teams are not short on effort. They are short on the capacity that the low-value work has already absorbed. Q: How do you create more time without working longer hours? A: By redesigning how work is done rather than adding hours: cutting meetings that update instead of decide, removing low-value work done out of habit, clarifying decisions, and protecting time for focused work. Capacity is created by subtraction. McKinsey research shows redesigning how work gets done can deliver up to 30 percent more performance, without anyone working longer. Q: What is the Capacity Operating Model? A: It is Suzanne’s proprietary approach, built on lean and agile principles, for freeing capacity and keeping it. It moves through four phases: Target: getting clear on what creates value; Intentionally: redesigning how people work and removing low-value work; Move Forward: protecting and directing the recovered capacity; and Evolve: adapting continuously so the gains hold and wellbeing is protected. Q: Does focusing on wellbeing mean sacrificing performance? A: No. Once the low-value work is removed, wellbeing and performance move together rather than against each other. Burnout in high performers is usually a sign that the system is wasting their capacity, not that they need to push harder. Protecting capacity is what makes high performance sustainable rather than a prelude to attrition. Q: Who is this keynote for? A: Senior leaders and boards, operations and transformation teams, high-performers at risk of burnout, and functional and project managers, any audience working too hard on work that does not create enough value.
About Suzanne Knight
Suzanne Knight, MBA, MA is a keynote speaker and transformation strategist who helps leaders turn complexity into clarity, unlock capacity, and deliver measurable results. She led Digital and Efficiency Transformation at Walmart Canada and has advised more than 80 organizations across 14 countries, spanning Fortune 500 companies, governments, and high-growth teams.
She is the founder and CEO of mBolden, a global management consulting firm, the creator of the Capacity Operating Model, and a TEDx speaker whose talk, The Myth of Doing It All, explores the hidden cost of doing too much. She is an instructor at the Schulich School of Business Executive Education and has been featured by Forbes Middle East and ChosunBiz, the largest media agency in Korea.
Her work centres on a single conviction: transformation succeeds or fails through execution, and the quality of the strategy cannot overcome ineffective delivery.