Treat the reported symptom and the leak reappears one handoff away. These five steps start from the system the symptom sits in, and end with a figure at your own rates.
A new platform speeds up the way you already work, flaws included. Faster is still broken, just sooner.
Moves the boxes. The handoffs nobody owns move with them, because a handoff nobody owns is a decision nobody made on purpose.
Build awareness, but a habit the structure works against fades once the session is over.
Nothing on it is priced, so nothing on it can be ranked, and the one that gets funded is the one with the loudest sponsor.
The framework starts from evidence: one problem named, priced, and put in order by what it costs to leave it.
The socio-economic approach was created by Henri Savall and developed with Véronique Zardet and the ISEOR team at Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3. It links what a company earns to how its people work, day to day.
The six places a problem can live. In a commercial organisation, they read as roles, handoffs, tools, time, training and whether the strategy reaches Tuesday.
The physical side of the work: space, equipment, tools, workload and hours. In a commercial organisation it usually shows up as tools that do not fit the way the team works, or a workload that quietly makes quality optional.
How tasks, roles, responsibilities and decisions are divided up and connected. The common commercial version is a handoff whose content nobody defined and whose owner nobody named, so it works when people are generous and fails when they are busy.
Communication, coordination and cooperation: how information travels between the people who need it, whether it arrives in time to be used, and whether the teams it touches agree on what to do with it (the third C is concertation in the French original). It fails where what one team learned never reaches the team that has to act on it.
How time is planned, protected and spent, and what is allowed to interrupt it. The classic commercial version is senior people spending their week on exceptions that a defined process would have handled.
Whether people have been taught the job they are asked to do, as that job changes. It fails quietly: the training happened once, and the job moved afterwards.
Whether the stated strategy reaches daily work and the decisions people make without asking. A strategy that changes nothing about what anyone does on a Tuesday has not been implemented, whatever the deck says.
The five ways a problem shows itself. In commercial work, rework and lost productivity carry most of the weight; the other three stay because they are the sharpest evidence when they appear.
Time people were meant to be working and were not there. It is usually read as a health measure and is often a strain measure: the same conditions that produce rework produce absence.
Harm caused by the work itself. It is rare in commercial settings and stays in the model because it is the sharpest evidence that how work is organised has a physical cost.
People leaving and being replaced. In a commercial team it is expensive twice: the ramp-up you already paid for walks out, and the customer relationships walk out with it.
Work that has to be redone, corrected or apologised for. In commercial work it is the deal reworked, the wrong scope sold, the onboarding restarted, the forecast revised for the third time.
Less output than the same people, tools and time could produce. It is the gap between what the team could do and what it does, and because nobody has named it, it never shows up as a problem to solve.
The six kinds of cost a hidden cost is counted in, at your own rates. Three leave a trace in a system somewhere; three are defined by what did not happen, and those are the larger ones.
Work done by someone paid more than the task needs. A director sorting out a scheduling clash is paying director rates for coordination, and the payroll line looks unchanged.
Hours worked beyond the plan to hold the same output. It is the most visible of the six and usually among the smallest, which is why counting only overtime understates the total.
Things bought to make up for a problem: another tool, more data, more agency hours, an extra seat. Each purchase makes sense on its own, which is exactly why the pattern is invisible.
Output that did not happen because the time went somewhere else. The hours that went into rework are hours that did not go into pipeline, and nothing records the trade.
Value never created because the capacity to create it was used up elsewhere. The segment not entered, the motion not scaled, the hire not made: it is the largest of the six and the one no report carries.
Exposure the company is carrying rather than counting: a dependency on one person, a commitment with no record, a rule nobody can defend if challenged. It turns into a number only when it lands, and then it lands all at once.
Inherited from the ISEOR hidden-cost model. A problem in any family can show up through any indicator and land in any of the six costs, which is why the three lists are read together rather than one after another. The model is ISEOR's and is credited as theirs wherever it appears. What Kihon adds is the order the five steps run in, and their use on the way a B2B company wins and keeps revenue.
One leak, followed from the interview to the figure. The inputs below are placeholders chosen to keep the sums easy; a Diagnosis replaces every one of them with your records and your rates.
Eight account executives each say they spend part of Monday re-entering and reconciling pipeline data the CRM already holds, because two stages mean different things to two teams. Dysfunction family: communication, coordination, cooperation. Indicator: lack of direct productivity.
The CRM's edit history and the team's calendars put the Monday work at about three hours per person, for forty-six working weeks. That is 8 × 3 × 46 = 1,104 hours a year that the operating records can corroborate, before anyone's memory is trusted.
If the company's own loaded rate for the role is €70 an hour, the component is 1,104 × €70 = €77,280 a year of non-production: the hours went into rework rather than into pipeline. A benchmark rate is never used; the company's is.
The reporting tool bought last year to "fix the forecast" is overconsumption, at its invoice value. The deals not worked in those hours are non-creation of potential: counted only where the evidence reaches a figure, and recorded as a stated gap where it does not.
The evidence carries the sources, the assumptions and the range they may move within. The leak can now be ranked against the cost of fixing it, which is the only reason to put a number on it at all.
Whose terms these are: the components are ISEOR's, defined term by term in the three lists above; the order they are followed in here is Kihon's.
From first contact to renewal: who does what, and where work changes hands. The crossings are where the leaks usually sit.
Marketing
Marketing → Sales
Sales
Sales → Finance → Product → Operations
Operations → Customer success
Customer success
A sentence goes into your report only if it passes the first five tests. A number goes in only if it passes the second five; where one fails, the report says so instead of printing the number.
Every line, or it does not enter
Every line, or the gap is stated instead
Bring one symptom and the records you already keep on it. The call says which step it enters at, and what it would take to price it.