My sympathies lie with managers and knowledge workers. They are hard working, devoted, and always expected to accomplish more with less. And while you could say the same for other employees, the managers and knowledge workers face special challenges—challenges unrecognized and unappreciated by their supervisors, and even by themselves.

To make these challenges crystal clear, I’ll divide the workforce into two categories based on one simple criteria: whether their work primarily involves moving physical objects or cognitive objects.

Physical vs. cognitive objects

In a manufacturing business, these physical objects include order forms, materials, parts, assemblies, products, manuals, invoices, and shipping crates. These are concrete, tangible objects which, by the way, usually move through well-known, clearly-defined physical production processes.

In service businesses, physical objects also drive well-known, clearly-defined production processes. For example, at a bank you fill out an application for a mortgage and submit it, often along with other physical objects such as a driver’s license. Several bank employees touch that application, whether physically or electronically, as it progresses through their approval process. In the end, they provide the borrower with physical evidence of the mortgage and necessary payments.

In both cases, the physical objects that move through the production process are visible and tangible. You can count them, point to them, and measure their progress through the production systems.

Many workers are primarily involved in moving these physical objects through the physical production processes. Managers and knowledge workers, on the other hand, are primarily involved in moving cognitive objects. Objects such as ideas, decisions, and plans. Cognitive objects are invisible and intangible. When you try to call them out and “point to them,” there is abundant room for confusion and disagreement. They are tough to count and extremely difficult to corral. Tracking their progress is laughable because they aren’t distinct, countable entities that move through well-known, clearly-defined processes toward predictable conclusions.

Source of my sympathies

And therein lie my sympathies for managers and knowledge workers who work almost exclusively in, what I call, the cognitive zone—the land of ideas, decisions, and plans. Managers and knowledge workers spend little time and effort moving physical objects. Instead, they devote tremendous energy struggling to move cognitive objects without the benefits that production workers generally enjoy:

• Clear requirements and priorities so they know exactly what they must accomplish
• Well-known, well-defined processes so they know how and with whom they must work
• The ability to see, track, and measure progress
• The luxury of being able to focus rather than dealing with meetings, email, shifting priorities, politics, power, and difficult personalities every inch of the way
• The ability to pass responsibilities on to others who know exactly where things stand and what must come next.

Some employees work in both worlds and that’s OK. They also have my sympathies whenever they are trying to make progress in the cognitive zone!

How did we get to this point?

Once you understand the distinction between physical and cognitive objects, it is pretty easy to appreciate why those working predominantly in the cognitive zone face added challenge and frustration.

• Most improvement efforts have focused on streamlining the production processes, not the cognitive processes needed to move cognitive objects.
• Efforts to streamline non-production processes generally end up creating physical objects such as forms, templates, and checklists that are then treated as physical processes. Techniques that work for physical processes usually create bureaucracy and waste when applied to cognitive processes.
• We simply don’t have clearly-defined, well-known processes within reach for handling ideas, decisions, and plans. Most employees have no cognitive toolkit. If you ask people how they make decisions you will get as many answers as people you ask.
• We don’t even think in terms of process when engaged in moving ideas, decisions, and plans. We generally just talk and hope to reach a conclusion.
• We assume the confusion and frustration we encounter daily is unavoidable. While we would never tolerate disruptions in our physical processes that could reduce production uptime below 99.9%, we are oblivious to the many factors that reduce our cognitive uptime to about 20%.
• We don’t recognize the fact that 95% of conflict is caused by a lack of clarity.
• We are blind to the level of confusion and waste that eats our profits, destroys our productivity, undermines our confidence, breeds conflict, and leaves us so unsatisfied.
• Our blindness prevents us from making the cognitive zone a priority. We have never tried to make our cognitive processes as efficient and effective as our physical processes.

Every problem is an opportunity and this one is HUGE!

Our lack of awareness of this cognitive zone problem and the tools needed to solve it are the reason I have written The Power of Clarity: Unleash the True Potential of Workplace Productivity, Confidence, and Empowerment. The next performance frontier requires tackling the cognitive zone. That’s where the opportunity lies and it is enormous! Managers and knowledge workers can become far more productive and able to cruise with confidence to better results in much less time. You can dramatically increase the effective size of your workforce simply by increasing cognitive uptime. This is an opportunity you can’t afford to miss.

This article first appeared on Forbes, August 6th, 2021