The bottleneck you can't see is the one killing your program

Most government programs aren't short on effort. They're short on visibility. Work moves through layers of handoffs, approvals, and queues and no one can see where it's stalling, what's causing the delay, or which steps are failing to move the mission forward.

You can't fix what you can't see.

In this Mission O/S Live, Rise8 Product Management Enablement Lead Rob Monroe sits down with Karen Martin—award-winning author and founder of TKMG and TKMG Academy—to talk about one of the most powerful and underused diagnostic tools available to government leaders: the Value Stream Map.

Karen has spent decades walking into complex organizations, mapping how work flows, and exposing the bottlenecks hiding in plain sight. Her work spans Fortune 100 companies, federal agencies, and healthcare systems, and her core argument is simple: clarity has to come before solutions.

They'll cover:

• Why government programs struggle to see their own bottlenecks—and what it costs when waste stays invisible
• What value stream mapping reveals that dashboards, status reports, and process docs don't
• How to use a mapping exercise to build shared understanding across functions and create the conditions for real change
• Why layering AI and automation on top of unmapped processes accelerates the wrong things—and what to do first

You'll walk away with a clearer picture of where progress stalls and how to fix it.