I was recently talking to a colleague who casually mentioned that she didn’t really know what some of her team members did day-in and day-out. She was not talking about their job descriptions or the deliverables on which their performance is judged, but the actual work they did throughout each day of their work week.

That’s because most organizations have never taken a deep dive into the daily nuts-and-bolts of the jobs they pay people to do.

What leaders usually think about when trying to improve an organization’s operational effectiveness is not the work being done, but the organization’s operating model or structure—the lines and boxes that make up its organizational chart. They might reorganize; consolidate; streamline, or adopt a more-radical operating model, such as agile@scale. After getting costs down (the real objective all along), most declare victory and return to business as usual.

Some think deeper and go further. They realize that when they transform their organization’s operating model, they’ve changed their talent needs. This provides an opportunity to upskill, reskill, and hire to get the enhanced capabilities they require. The really ambitious, those with long-term horizons, also think about the high-performance culture they need—the behaviors, starting at the top, to work differently.

But all such efforts come from the periphery of the work and how it gets done, all day, each and every work day. Isn’t that where most value gets created, where innovation happens, where vital connections are formed?