The AustralianSuper Case—A Symptom of a Deeper Problem
Waste is a thief. It steals time, drains resources, erodes trust, and sabotages progress—leaving organizations chasing efficiency while unknowingly feeding the very inefficiencies they seek to eliminate.
When the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) launched legal action against AustralianSuper [Source], the issue wasn’t just about delayed death benefit claims—it was a glaring example of how waste infiltrates and cripples even the most well-resourced organizations.
Despite deploying armies of process improvement specialists, fleets of RPA bots, and layers of BPM frameworks, AustralianSuper allegedly took between four months and four years to process at least 6,897 death benefit claims.
How does a company with such extensive resources, advanced automation, and process expertise still find itself drowning in inefficiency? Because waste is a thief that thrives in broken systems, and no amount of process improvement alone can stop it.
The Illusion of Process Improvement: Why It’s Not Enough
Organizations have spent billions on Lean, millions on Six Sigma, and countless hours on RPA, yet inefficiencies persist. Why? Because they chase waste at the surface level instead of eliminating its source.
You can streamline a process, automate a task, or add more oversight, but if the system itself breeds inefficiency, waste will always find another way in.
Here’s why organizations fail to stop the thief:
- Fixing the Parts While the Whole Remains Vulnerable
Most organizations approach improvement like patching holes in a sinking ship: they optimize individual processes, but if the system itself creates inefficiencies, those patches won’t hold.
Take AustralianSuper: automating claim approvals in one department might seem like progress, but if compliance reviews, legacy systems, or misaligned performance targets remain unchanged, the bottleneck shifts elsewhere.
The illusion of progress hides the deeper problem, the system remains flawed, and the thief keeps stealing.
- Chasing Waste Instead of Catching the Real Culprit
Process improvement specialists are trained to reduce waste, minimize variation, and enhance efficiency, but if they don’t identify the system constraints that create waste, they’re only treating symptoms.
If a claims process takes years, the real problem isn’t just slow approvals—it’s likely:
- Fragmented accountability across multiple departments.
- Legacy systems that don’t communicate effectively.
- Performance metrics that incentivize the wrong behaviors.
Without addressing these deeper system failures, process improvement merely rearranges waste instead of eliminating it.
History Repeats Itself: The HMRC Taxation Disaster
AustralianSuper isn’t the first to fall victim to systemic waste.
In 2007, the UK’s National Audit Office reported that more than one million people had paid the wrong amount of tax because HMRC either miscalculated or assigned incorrect tax codes (System thinking in public sector_Chapter4_John Seddon). The consequences were severe:
- £157 million overpaid by 540,000 taxpayers (an average of £290 per person), disproportionately impacting pensioners.
- £125 million underpaid, leaving thousands with unexpected bills.
The cause? A misguided attempt to treat taxation as a manufacturing process.
HMRC introduced what was described as a “car assembly line” approach to tax processing—splitting up tasks among six people instead of two. Nearly £10 million was spent on implementing a “lean system”, yet errors skyrocketed in the first six months.
The mistake? Treating service work like an assembly line created more waste, more rework, and more failure points.
Just as in the AustralianSuper case, the system—not the process—was the real problem. Breaking work into smaller tasks, handled by different people, didn’t create efficiency; it created confusion, compounded errors, and allowed waste to thrive.
A System-Wide Shift: Catching the Thief at the Source
If Australia’s largest super fund, managing nearly $300 billion, can suffer from inefficiencies of this scale, and if a tax system handling millions of people’s finances can collapse under flawed process improvements, what does that say about other organizations?
The solution isn’t more bots, more process tweaks, or another BPM framework—it’s about stopping waste at its source:
- Stop optimizing parts—fix the system that allows waste to thrive.
- Stop chasing waste—eliminate the conditions that produce it.
- Stop mimicking manufacturing—understand inefficiencies in service industries.
Organizations that fail to make this shift will continue bleeding resources, losing customer trust, and setting themselves up for regulatory scrutiny—no matter how many improvement specialists they hire.
Because waste doesn’t disappear when you improve a process—it just finds another way in.
The Path Forward: Rethinking Efficiency at the System Level
The companies that truly eliminate inefficiency don’t just improve processes, they redesign systems.
The real question isn’t, “How do we improve this process?”
The real question is, “How do we design a system where waste has nowhere to hide?”
Until organizations start catching the thief at its source, they will keep losing—time, money, and trust.
Read More:
The Toolhead Trap: How Pseudo-Lean is Wasting Public Service Resources
The Consultancy Racket: How PwC and others turned Australia’s Public Sector into a profit machine
