Business cycles are speeding up, yet businesses seem to be slowing down.

So here’s something to ponder: For decades, businesses have focused on their processes, using techniques like Lean, Six Sigma, and Theory of Constraints to reduce process cycle time while improving quality and reducing incremental costs.

Making products flow off an assembly line is nice. But assembly-line-like processes aren’t what slow a business down. It’s the inability to make fast, accurate decisions and act on them that gives so many businesses the appearance of a swimmer immersed in molasses.

Last week’s KJR discussed some of the particulars, with suggestions for speeding up decision-making by reducing committee-induced decision sclerosis.

But committees aren’t the only source of business slowdown. As a CFO of my acquaintance phrased the cure for another one, “Pick up the damned phone!”

Back in the days of Mad Men the cycle time for interoffice memos was measured in days. It started with hand-written or dictated text, handed to a secretary or sorted and transported by the mailroom staff on a (typically) twice-a-day schedule to the typing pool.

After a couple of edits, transports, and re-typings, the memo made its way to its intended recipient or recipients. The process took, in total, several days from initial dictation to final delivery.

Email replaced this with a process that took, in total, several minutes at most, while reducing the need for administrative assistants and typists at the same time.

Strangely, the committees that made decisions about such things back then didn’t jump on the new technology, yelling to IT, “How fast can we have this — the checkbook is open!” Go figure.

Anyway, everyone knows clogged email inboxes are a problem. But the ramifications of this indicator of email’s success go far beyond reductions of personal effectiveness.

Email has slowly slid from business accelerator to decision-bottleneck.

The cycle time for any process includes intrinsic cycle time, also known as touch time, and queue time. For email, touch time is how long opening a received email, reading it, clicking or tapping on the Reply button, typing your own message, and clicking or tapping on Send takes. Queue time is how long an email sits in your inbox before you open it.

When email was first introduced it shortened both of these compared to interoffice mail. Queue time has been lengthening ever since. Email has become a victim of its own success.

Compounding the felony is this: The distribution of interoffice memos was subject to the limitations of carbon paper, or the time and expense needed to make copies, added to which was the time and effort needed to fold the paper, insert it into interoffice mail envelopes, and address the envelopes.

With email there’s little burden associated with making sure it’s sent to everyone who ought to know about its contents. This isn’t something to stop, either. Sharing information with everyone who ought to know about it is a virtue, not a bad habit.

But, all these cc’s do add more clog to already overstuffed inboxes. For some folks, the time needed just to decide which ones to actually read and do something about has extended from a glance, to minutes, to, over the course of a busy day, as long as maybe an hour.

Or else, the messages that have scrolled down far enough are ignored entirely until the sender becomes frustrated enough to either re-send the original message or to pick up the damned telephone.

But I oversimplified, because if this was the total impact of queue time, it would be a livable problem.

Here’s why it counts as a major source of business decision slowdown: Queue time has to be totaled over all the messages in an email thread. In total, cumulative queue time can result in multi-day delays when reaching even simple decisions.

What’s to be done?

Picking up the damned telephone is hardly a cure-all: You’re more likely to reach voicemail than your target, and voicemails take longer to process than emails.

What telephone conversations will do is eliminate most of an email thread’s queue time: Instead of hitting the Reply button you converse.

Use your calendar system to schedule the call and attach whatever background material is essential, so you don’t just replace exchanging voicemails for exchanging emails.

One more thing: The organization as a whole has to find an alternative to cc-ing everyone who ought to know about something. This is far from easy. As a stopgap, consider installing Outlook with a default rule that yanks every email for which the recipient is on the cc-list and stashes it in a separate “cc for review” folder.

It ain’t pretty. But sometimes, less ugly will just have to do.