Nobody drew the line

The two sentences

Almost every handover of work contains two sentences. The first is the task. The second is some version of "you own this — run with it."

The second sentence is meant warmly and it is usually sincere. It hands over something real: the authority to decide how the work gets done. What it does not hand over is any of the information that makes that authority exercisable, and the person saying it cannot see that there is anything else to hand over, because they already have all of it.

This site is about the gap between those two facts. It is not an argument against autonomy; it is an argument that autonomy arrives in two parts and that one of them routinely goes missing.

What the second part consists of

Four things, and they are the same four every time:

• The constraint. What must not change, with a number on it, and whatever the number is attached to — a contract, a renewal, an outage somebody remembers.
• The precedent. Whether this has been attempted before, and the reason it stopped. Not a verdict; a fact about the past.
• The decider. Who holds a standing view on this area, whether or not they are in the room, and whether their view is a veto or an opinion.
• The purpose. Who asked for the work, and what they will do with it. Not the version written in the plan — the specific one.

Each takes about a minute to say. Each takes between three days and three weeks to reconstruct from evidence. That ratio is the whole economics of this subject, and the reason it never corrects itself is that the minute is paid by one person and the three weeks by another.

What happens in the first hour

Watch somebody receive a thin brief and the first hour is not spent on the work. It is spent on four pieces of detective work running in parallel.

They look for the constraint by proposing something small and watching the reaction. They look for the precedent by searching for the nouns in the task and hoping a stale branch turns up. They look for the decider by reading who commented on the last change in this area. They look for the purpose by trying to reconstruct it from the shape of the request.

None of that is visible from outside. From outside it looks like somebody getting started slowly. And none of it produces facts — it produces four beliefs, which the work then gets built on.

The person is not being obstructed and is not being tested. They are doing archaeology on a decision that was made in a meeting they were not in, and the archaeology is the part that takes the three weeks.

The two costs, one visible

When the beliefs turn out to be wrong, the work comes back. That is the visible cost: it has a date, an artefact and a conversation, and everybody involved knows it happened. On the quarter counted on this site, six pieces of work came back, the median going back two stages and two of them going all the way to the brief.

The invisible cost is larger. It is every decision somebody escalated that they did not need to escalate — the question asked, answered yes, and forgotten by both parties within the hour. Four of nine decisions on this record had more room than the person assumed. Each one was an afternoon of waiting for permission that already existed, and not one of them was ever corrected, because correcting it would have required somebody to say "you did not have to ask me that".

Those two costs have the same cause, which is the most useful thing on this page: a fact existed, somebody held it, and it did not arrive. Whether that produces a delay at the start or a return at the end depends only on whether the person decided to ask or decided to proceed.

How this site is arranged

Six parts. The first sets out the four things and what each one does. The second is about the edge of your own authority, which almost nobody is told and almost everybody guesses too low. The third is about the context that did not arrive, and why the people holding it cannot see that it is missing. The fourth is the cost — rework, and the escalations that leave no trace. The fifth is about asking, which is the cheapest fix available and the one people avoid for reasons worth examining. The sixth is for whoever hands work over, and it is five sentences long.

Half of what follows can be done by the person receiving the work, without anybody above them agreeing to anything. Asking four questions at the start produces the same four facts as somebody writing four sentences, and it does not need their cooperation to begin.