You know what? Good. Let me go do some research.

Did you know that average large business loses more than fifty million in productivity each year as a direct result of inefficient knowledge sharing?

Those were the latest numbers, according a recent workplace productivity report. In the study, a thousand workers were interviewed about a variety of knowledge management topics. While reading the report, one question in particular caught my eye.

How many hours in a standard forty hour workweek would you say you spend waiting to receive information, support, training or any other type of insight or guidance that only another team member can provide?

Turns out, employees spend an average of five hours every week waiting to get in touch with people that have the unique knowledge they need. Five hours. That’s one eighth of their entire week’s schedule.

In fact, for one in ten workers, the study claimed it’s not unusual to wait twice that long. And during that time, work is delayed, suspended or even canceled altogether.

To me, this claim is both inaccurate and outrageous.

First of all, no worker in the modern business world actually needs forty hours a week to do their job properly. If we’re really honest with each other, the majority of professionals are productive for a maximum of three hours a day. Maybe four.

The rest of their billable time is wasted in meetings, bullshit tasks that preserve the illusion of productivity, commuting, and other exhausting but unnecessary efforts. If employees knew they only had thirty hours a week to get everything done, they’d waste less time, focus on what’s important, and operate much leaner.

They wouldn’t sit around twiddling their thumbs, hoping some colleague sent them an email with the information they needed. Instead, they would either be proactive and solve the problems themselves, or find a way to proceed with less than complete information.

My second issue with the study is, who are these inept monkeys whose entire intellectual assembly line has to shut down when they can’t get in touch with someone?

Are workers so codependent and directionless that they can’t execute other work in the meantime?

Parallel processing isn’t that hard. Managing multiple priorities is the price of admission in the modern working world. If a team member at your organization has unique knowledge, but they’re not instantly available, tough shit. Go work on something else. No need for paralysis just because one person isn’t pinging you back immediately.

Workers who are adaptable, creative and resilient can make progress in any work task, at any given time, irrespective of other people’s direct involvement.

I’m reminded of my old boss, who would tell our team:

If you message me with a question and don’t hear back within a day, it doesn’t mean I’m ignoring you, it means you need to figure it out yourself. Don’t wait for my input. Use your best judgment and keep moving forward.

Kevin wasn’t trying to be unkind or unhelpful. He just understood the demands on his schedule as the founder. He couldn’t afford to care about everything. He wanted to empower his staff to rely on themselves as much as possible.

Okay, let me offer one last comment about the productivity study.

Here’s the survey question that bothered me the most.

When you struggle to obtain information and knowledge that affects the ability to do your job, how does that make you feel?

Eight in ten respondents say they get frustrated, and a full quarter say they’re overwhelmed. The remaining twenty percent felt lost and confused.

Excuse me, but really? Were the participants of the study high school students? Am I to believe that working professionals are so fragile, they collapse emotionally anytime they confront informational ambiguity?

Look, I’ve led knowledge management initiatives at many different companies. I understand it can be discouraging to not have everything we need to do our job all the time. But at the risk of sounding like a football coach here, that’s why they call it work.

The world isn’t always going to present us with easily accessible, complete information.

Sometimes work means stumbling through a dark room in the middle of the night and smashing our big toe on the bed frame.

Sometimes work means taking a wild guess, getting it wrong and humiliating ourselves, but then learning for next time.

These aren’t bad things. Personally, anytime I struggle to obtain information and knowledge that affects the ability to do my job, I feel motivated. I say to myself:

You know what? Good. Let me go do some research and figure this out myself.

That’s called ownership, and it’s more valuable than any piece of information somebody else could give you.

Are you adaptable in the face of incomplete information? Do you wait for people to get back to you, or do you find ways to move the story forward without their direct involvement?

Truth is, nobody needs a hundred percent of anything. Humans are perfectly capable of taking action despite less than perfect conditions, information and experience.

Hell, even if a given action at work results in a terrible outcome, very few things are irreversible and career ending. Bouncing back isn’t hard when you have the tools.

I have no doubt that businesses lose millions of dollars in productivity each year as a direct result of inefficient knowledge sharing. But most of those forces are outside our sphere of control. We can’t will someone to get back to us faster. People are going to do what they’re going to do. Things are going to take however long they take.

In the meantime, we don’t wait, we create.

If we can’t work with people, we learn to work around them.

What do you need to give yourself permission to stop waiting for?