Who is David Carneal?
David Carneal is the Founder of Digital Efficiency Consulting Group and a Perspective Alignment Coach based in Orange County, California, and the thing that defines him is a refusal to accept the first explanation for anything. Where most consultants arrive with a framework and a fix, Carneal arrives with a question. Twenty-five years into a career built on finding the real problem underneath the stated one, he still calls himself, without irony, someone who likes mysteries.
The dashboard says everything is fine.
Green across the board. Numbers up. Targets met. And yet something in the building feels wrong, the kind of wrong that never shows up in a spreadsheet. A manager walks the floor and notices people taking a longer path to finish a task that should take five minutes. She asks why. Nobody has a clean answer. They just do it that way. They always have.
Somewhere between the report and the reality, a gap opened up, and nobody can say exactly when.
This is the space most organizations never think to look. The space between what leadership believes is happening and what is actually happening three floors down, across the counter, or on the other end of a customer service call. The metric tells you the outcome. It rarely tells you the truth.
The Mysteries He Couldn’t Leave Alone
Carneal never had a career plan. Early on, he worked multiple jobs and took on temp assignments without a clear destination. He wasn’t chasing a title. He was trying to figure out what he was good at, learning as much from what he disliked as from what he did.
What he discovered was a pattern. He kept noticing things that didn’t add up. A number that looked off. A process that made no sense on paper but somehow still ran the business. His instinct was to keep asking questions until the real story surfaced.
One early lesson came in his twenties while helping his boss run a continuing education program for optometrists. Attendance had grown beyond the capacity of the hotel ballroom, and the situation seemed straightforward: if the room could no longer hold everyone, they would need to move the program to a larger hotel. That would mean leaving a venue and hotel team they valued, potentially increasing costs, and passing some of that expense on to the optometrists who relied on the program for their continuing education. Carneal wondered whether the obvious answer was actually the only answer.
Just five feet down the hall was another ballroom. Using projectors, microphones, audio, video, and some creative wiring, they turned it into a satellite room and carried the same presentation into both spaces. Capacity effectively doubled from roughly 100 attendees to 200 without changing hotels or significantly altering the program. What made the solution valuable was not the technology itself. It was recognizing that the real requirement was not “find a bigger ballroom.” The requirement was “create room for more attendees.” By separating the requirement from the assumed solution, they preserved the venue relationship, controlled costs, and kept the program accessible to the optometrists it served.
The experience established a pattern that would follow him throughout his career.
“Before spending money or making a major change, make sure you understand the problem you’re actually trying to solve,” he says.
Years later, during a company acquisition, he applied the same instinct at a larger scale. Two businesses looked nearly identical on paper yet operated very differently. Carneal helped design a hybrid approach: internally, the acquired business moved onto processes known to work; externally, the familiar customer experience was preserved. The integration closed in under 60 days. Six months later, sales among those customers were up 23 percent.
Those experiences became the foundation for Digital Efficiency Consulting Group. Today, DECG specializes in workflow diagnostics and process development, looking beneath the stated problem to understand how work actually happens, where friction exists, and what can be made easier, faster, less expensive, or better.
The philosophy is captured in the company’s tagline: “Small improvements create real change.” Carneal’s approach isn’t transformation for transformation’s sake. DECG isn’t there to become a permanent fixture in the organization or launch a multi-year transformation when a handful of targeted improvements will do. The goal is to understand the problem, make practical changes, measure the impact, and leave the organization with processes it can own and continue without him. Often, correcting a few small points of friction can change the performance of an entire workflow.
The Understanding Problem
Ask Carneal what organizations get wrong and he won’t start with software, headcount, or strategy.
“Most organizations don’t have a staffing problem, a technology problem, or even a process problem. They have an understanding problem,” he says.
For years, Carneal took pride in being the employee who knew how everything worked, the one who could handle every exception and workaround. It felt like value. Eventually, he recognized the risk: if critical knowledge lives inside one person’s head, the organization doesn’t actually own the process. The employee does.
Carneal calls that person the “Tribal Knowledge Chief,” the employee everyone turns to because they know the exceptions, workarounds, history, and unwritten rules. They can be extraordinarily valuable, but they can also signal that too much organizational knowledge lives with a person instead of within the process.
That realization reshaped how he approaches process development: improve and document workflows so the organization, rather than individual heroes, can own how the work gets done.
But understanding a workflow requires understanding the people experiencing it.
Leadership, employees, customers, Finance, Sales, IT, and Operations can all look at the same situation and see different realities. Carneal doesn’t view those differences as noise.
The differences themselves are information.
That idea sits at the center of Perspective Alignment. Carneal examines where perspectives overlap, where they conflict, what each may be missing, and how they compare with the workflow and available evidence. That leads to the framework he uses today: Awareness, Understanding, Alignment, and Action.
“You cannot effectively improve a process until you understand the different realities of the people experiencing it,” he explains.
The stakes are real. In one engagement, challenging assumptions behind a proposed technology implementation helped a client avoid roughly one million dollars in unnecessary spending. Digitizing a poorly understood workflow doesn’t fix it. Replacing a system before understanding why the existing process isn’t working can simply turn an operational problem into an expensive one.
Some of Carneal’s sharpest thinking on perspective came from an unexpected place: a vacation.
Fascinated by cruise ship operations, Carneal turned curiosity into a field study across multiple sailings. It produced 97 pages of observations, more than 500 guest conversations, and a series of articles examining operations and customer experience. With no predefined problem to solve, he watched operations happen organically, spoke with guests and crew, and noticed where policy and actual practice diverged.
“People could experience the same ship, same meal, same employee, same moment, and describe completely different experiences,” he says.
A dashboard can tell you what happened. It can’t always tell you why or how the people involved experienced it. When Carneal diagnoses a workflow, he wants to understand what management thinks is happening, what employees say is happening, what customers experience, and what actually happens when the process is under pressure.
The gaps between those perspectives are often where the most valuable operational discoveries are hiding.
The Carneal Playbook: 5 Lessons
Diagnose before you spend. Understand the actual problem before approving a purchase, hire, or new system, or you risk solving the wrong thing expensively.
Treat tribal knowledge as a risk, not an asset. If only one employee understands how a process really works, the company doesn’t own that process yet.
Hold your hypothesis loosely. Form an opinion quickly, then actively look for evidence that could prove it wrong.
Collect more than one version of the truth. What leadership sees, employees experience, and customers feel are rarely the same story. Those differences are information.
Automation doesn’t fix confusion, it scales it. Powerful technology applied to a poorly understood workflow helps you make the same mistake faster.
Reading the Room Behind the Report
Back on that factory floor, the manager finally gets her answer. The longer path everyone takes isn’t laziness or carelessness. It’s a workaround built years ago for a problem that no longer exists, kept alive because nobody ever asked why it was there. The metric never could have told her that. Only a conversation could.
That hidden cost is part of what DECG calls “Workflow Tax”: the unnecessary time, effort, rework, and expense organizations quietly absorb because inefficient steps and outdated workarounds have simply become part of how work gets done.
That is the work David Carneal has built a career around, not reading the dashboard louder, but stepping past it to ask the question the dashboard was never built to answer. Finding the problem is only the beginning. Once the reality of the workflow is understood, the work becomes developing a better way forward, making the changes necessary to get it working, and leaving the organization with a process it can own.
The gap between what a report says and what people actually live through never closes itself. Someone has to go looking for it.
David Carneal is the Founder of Digital Efficiency Consulting Group and a Perspective Alignment Coach based in Orange County, California. Through workflow diagnostics, process development, and Perspective Alignment, he helps organizations uncover operational blind spots, understand how work actually happens, and develop practical improvements that solve the right problems and use resources more intelligently.
