What's this standing order for?

Updated 3rd Aug 2026.

The standing order nobody cancelled

I was doing one of the most tedious jobs ever, at least for me – looking through bank statements for standing orders and direct debits to cut.

I suspect many of us have the same challenge in these subscription based times. Somewhere on your bank statement there's almost certainly a payment you'd forgotten about. A subscription to something you used twice. A standing order set up for a reason that made perfect sense in 2019 and now, well, you may not even remember what it was for.

The money leaves on the same day each month, with great punctuality, and you've long since stopped seeing it, unless you look. That's the trouble with a payment you can't feel — it doesn't stop. It just keeps going, mechanically funding something that may, or may not, be valuable to you.

Now picture that same blind spot scaled up to a few hundred people and several million pounds, and you have a reasonable description of how a great many organisations spend their money.

Here's what I tend to see more often that I wish. Capable, thoughtful people are hard at work — spending time, energy and attention, the most valuable currencies any of us has — on things that release very little value to the customer, or business, or even, themselves.

And meanwhile, some of the most valuable work in the organisation is happening in a dusty corner, disconnected from anything strategic, unrecognised, and sometimes unprotected. Both are expensive. Everyone's busy. Money is moving. And the business doesn't seem any nearer to where it wants to go.

Now, isn't that interesting idea to sit with? Because it looks like a motivation problem from the outside – lots of work, value not always emerging and activity filling people's days. And it almost never is. It's a visibility problem — and underneath that, a wiring problem.

When you can't see the line from what you put in to what comes out, the work loses its connection, and something happens to the people doing it. We don't tire only from effort. We tire from effort we can't connect to anything meaningful or obvious.

Every piece of work, whether it's a novel written over lunch in the breakout room or a platform built by two hundred people, sits on the same simple chain: investment → activity → value. You commit something — money, time, energy, attention. Work happens. And, if you're lucky and paying attention, something arrives in the world that a person outside genuinely wants, uses, pays for, or learns from. Keep that chain whole and even flawed work begins to compound, especially from the learning it often brings us. Break it anywhere, and busy activity, and the investments being made tend to slowly leak out through the gaps.

I've seen it tend to wobble in two very ordinary places. When investment stops connecting to specific activity, the money invested turns abstract — funding "something" nobody can quite name, to deliver something we're not entirely sure about.

And when activity stops connecting to a specific value being delivered, the work turns performative, or boring, or tedious, or just a drag — motion that produces lovely tracking metrics and not much else, for almost everybody involved. Either break, in either place, and the thread you'd need in order to learn anything is gone, let alone see how what you put in returned something – and whether it was worth being part of the work too.

A better version I believe, is a bit like fishing with a good tight line. Rod, line, hook, and whatever is down there at the far end, usually a shopping trolley or a bike — all connected, so the smallest tug travels straight up into your hands. Ten million pounds goes toward a new platform; on a tight line, that money maps to a defined set of work, which maps forward to an expected return. Everyone, from the team to the finance office, can feel the whole thread. When it lands, you know it landed. When it doesn't, you can learn why. And you see that thread through the life of the work.

Most organisations, though, fish with a tangled line — several pots of money funding a swirl of overlapping projects, and no honest way to say which spend produced which result. They might be catching everything. They might be catching nothing. They genuinely cannot tell the difference.

The unglamorous tool for keeping that line tight has a slightly grand name: a portfolio. The word once meant nothing more than a collection of papers carried together; here it just means a single, coherent view of everything you're investing in, and why. There's a whole discipline built around this — it goes by lean portfolio management in the places that take it seriously — and it can grow very elaborate very quickly, with more tools and reporting and governance layers than anyone actually needs.

Stripped back, though, it exists to answer three very simple, but remarkably powerful, questions, and to keep answering them all the way through rather than only at the start, or the end: what are we investing in, what work is genuinely happening because of it, and what value is coming back — or not?

Ask those honestly and you arrive at the question that really matters, the one organisations are oddly reluctant to say out loud at the end of the work: was this worth it? Not as a judgement. As learning. A place that can't answer it ends up with a back catalogue of finished work whose actual return is often a total mystery — and goes on funding more of the same, because it can't see clearly enough to stop.

Which is worth exploring a little too, because this sort of visibility gets misread constantly. It isn't surveillance, and it isn't governance for its own sake, and it certainly isn't micromanagement. A visible line from investment to value is simply the thing that lets good work be recognised, honest work be reviewed with kindness and curiosity, and stuck work be helped while there's still time to help it.

Hide the line and all three questions collapse into guesswork, blame and opinions: people fall back on gut feel, follow whoever's loudest, and watermelon reporting — green on the outside, red all the way through — thrives. Best of all, a clear line makes stopping something positively responsible rather than shameful. You can't defend killing a project whose original purpose no one can even remember. You can very easily defend moving the money toward work that's actually moving.

There's a very positive and optimistic way to hold all of this than the word "governance" will ever manage. That visible thread — investment, to activity, to value — isn't bureaucracy. It's respect. Respect for the time being spent, the attention being asked for, the money being committed, and the very human need to know your effort leads somewhere real. It's also the deepest respect you can give to the original idea. When people can see the line, they work differently — not because they're being watched, but because the work has been taken seriously enough to be worth watching.

Which brings us back to that forgotten standing order. The test is the same at any scale: would you spend your own money this way, month after month, with no idea what it was buying? Almost certainly not.

The strange thing is how readily we accept it at work — and how much of it stops the moment someone is simply willing to make the whole line visible again.