If you asked most managers where their team's capacity is going, they'd tell you: answering emails, processing requests, attending meetings, reviewing files. All of it necessary. All of it just the job.
What they rarely see is how much of that capacity is being consumed by work that only exists because something upstream failed.
This is Failure Demand — a concept coined by systems thinker John Seddon — and it is one of the most powerful lenses a Lean practitioner can apply to a government process. Lean Belt training teaches you what failure demand is and how to quantify it. Because if you can't put a number on it, you can't put a price tag on it. And without a price tag, leaders are very unlikely to act on it.
Failure demand comes in four main types. Here is each one with real public sector examples: