Show Notes
We explore delegation: why to do it and how to do it. The discussion ranges widely between the approaches the Prussian military used to command its forces to the ideas of the situational leadership model.
Opening quote from page 189 of the book “The Art of Action” by Stephen Bungay.
References
- The Art of Action – https://www.stephenbungay.com/Books.ink
- Briefing and Backbriefing – https://availagility.co.uk/2021/03/10/what-is-backbriefing/ also the book “The Art of Action”
- Curse of Knowledge – https://availagility.co.uk/2021/06/09/backbriefing-and-the-curse-of-knowledge/
- Situational Leadership – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situational_leadership_theory
- Doug Forcett – https://thegoodplace.fandom.com/wiki/Doug_Forcett
Transcript
Andy: One of the greatest fears of senior people is of letting go and thereby losing direct control. In delegating authority for decision-making one gives away power without giving away accountability. A lot of people who do not suffer from the pathology of authoritarians, find that a scary thing to do. It implies trusting your people.
If you have been brought up to believe that leadership is about knowing how to do something better than your followers, it is difficult to see the task of leaders as enabling followers to perform their jobs better than they otherwise would, and admitting that they may know how to do those jobs better than you do. Letting go is hard to do but can bring great rewards.
Mon-Chaio: today we’re gonna try a little something different. In all of the episodes we’ve done previously, we’ve talked about a paper, right? We’ve had a paper or an article that kind of anchored the discussion.
But I think we’d like to try something different today and talk about a topic that was inspired in part by a conversation I was having with a friend during dinner. And I think the topic is best stated as delegation. At least that’s where we’re gonna start.
Andy: Alright. Interesting. When you propose this to me, Mon-Chaio, you hadn’t said that. It came from that discussion over dinner. I’m interested. I don’t know why it pulls me in more, but somehow that story does pull me in a bit more to this discussion.
Mon-Chaio: Right. It’s funny. This was early on in our podcasting. I would say we had perhaps just recorded the first episode or maybe even before then Easter Egg for people who are longtime listeners of these four episodes. We have a ghost episode that we recorded that has never been released except to a certain few parties for comment.
So it may have been during the recording of that episode or whatnot. But my friend said, Ooh ooh, you have to do this topic. Delegation is a very, very common skill that people are asked to do.
Andy: As you’ve been asked to do on this, they have delegated to you this.
Mon-Chaio: Correct. Correct. But I think that there’s like a lot of topics we cover some very broad guidance. But there’s some really tricky problems around delegation that people just don’t talk about.
And so I feel like my friend, a lot of people have questions about some of the nuances and challenges of delegation that they never really feel comfortable getting answers to, or they don’t feel comfortable that the answers are out there or they’ve never spoken to anyone about it.
Andy: And I think that makes sense cuz it is a difficult activity. It is a broad topic cuz it touches on so many things. It touches on goal setting. It touches on communication, it touches on trust, it touches on accountability and reporting. It goes into all sorts of things. So, We’ll discuss it today, but I imagine we’ll be returning to this again and again throughout our episodes.
Mon-Chaio: I imagine so as well.
So getting right into it. I think a lot of the literature that’s published out there talks about this, right? It’s you want to delegate to people. In order to stretch them,
should have some ability or skill in that area already. And part of delegation is to help them grow that skill through mentorship during the delegation process.
But I do think that there’s still an interesting question, perhaps. About how do you identify who in your group of people that you want to delegate to is best to take a particular task?
Andy: So for this, I know we weren’t gonna base this on a paper, but I can’t help myself. So there’s a model called Situational Leadership. And in the model of situational leadership, there’s task readiness is one of the aspects of it.
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.
Andy: And what it says is that people have different readiness levels to take on any particular task.
as the person giving them that task you as the leader in that situation as a situational leader should approach them in different ways. You should use different leadership techniques based on where they are for taking on that task. And so I would say part of it is what is it that you want to achieve in delegating that task?
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.
Andy: So if you are purely going for, we have this person that I, they want to stretch them, I want to get them up on this task because I need to create, that capability somewhere else. You might grab someone who is at readiness level one, which means basically, They, they don’t know how to do it. They’re probably uncomfortable trying to do it.
Gonna need to take on a very coaching type approach, a very directive approach, tell them, well, this is the steps you need to do. This is how you’re going to do it. Report back to me at this point or pair with them on it. If we’re programming, you might sit down and pair with them on this is how you do this this thing.
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.
Andy: Or maybe it is purely a the another aspect of delegation, which we’re often told is if someone else can do it, they should do it rather than you. Like management things that’s often said is you delegate the things that others can do so that you are available for all of the stuff that others can’t do.
Mon-Chaio: Right, right.
Andy: And in that case, if that’s purely your reasoning, just do that. Then you’re probably looking for someone more readiness level four, which means that they’re completely willing, they’re completely able, you really just tell them, here’s what needs to happen, and they have the wherewithal to report back to you when it’s necessary and to ask for extra information when needed.
For the most part, it’s hands off. You give them a bit of support and they’re off.
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.
Andy: So who you choose comes down to what do you wanna achieve?
Mon-Chaio: Yeah, I think that’s a great way to think about it. And I like that you brought it to situational leadership because I like that word, the situational part of it. And I do think that some of the times when. Delegation falls down is because you pick the wrong person based on the situation.
Andy: Or, or your situational leadership wrong. You think, you think
Mon-Chaio: an S one task or whatever,
Andy: You think that they’re readiness level four, but actually their readiness level two and it just doesn’t work out.
Mon-Chaio: Right? Right. Well and beyond that, I would say beyond their readiness level, I think you can assess sort of the the situation wrong, right? You could put your situation or the task itself in the wrong quadrant. And so then you don’t match to their readiness level. So I think that makes a lot of sense. I think a big part of it also that people get wrong is you mentioned willingness. And I think that is such an important part of delegation where I know that You know, there are parts of the situational leadership readiness spectrum, which has that term unwilling,
Andy: Yes,
Mon-Chaio: but in my mind, I don’t know that I am comfortable delegating a task to someone who is unwilling.
Andy: They do actually give a little bit of nuance to it. It’s unwilling or not confident
It kind of lets those kind of blur together a little bit. So, yeah, completely unwilling.
you gotta
Be careful about,
But not confident because you can have this combination of they are completely able to do it, but just aren’t confident in their own abilities.
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm. That’s right.
Andy: And so they’re nervous about it, and you’re kind of, you need to get them ready,
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.
Andy: which can also look like unwilling because they might hold back
Mon-Chaio: right. But I do think that that’s really important to distinguish. I think, you know, the unconfident and able or unable, right. Depending on which readiness block you fall into, I think is great for delegation. But completely unwilling. I think there’s another discussion to be had there perhaps, but for me,
Andy: I think, I think then you get into the question about why are you so unwilling? Is this a an unreasonable request to think that I should be able to delegate this to someone? And it gets into a much deeper discussion about what are the roles and what are people trying to achieve in their career or their, or their job at that time.
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm. And this might be a good segue into. We’ve never really talked about it, but why do people delegate? We jumped right into,
How do you choose who delegates, but like, why delegate at all?
Andy: Simon Sinek would say, start with why.
Mon-Chaio: So let’s talk about that. What are your thoughts? Why do people delegate? Why should people delegate or should people do it at all?
Andy: I’ll tell you the most common reason that I delegate, which straight off the bat is probably a bad reason. Is, too much to do.
Mon-Chaio: Aha. Aha. Okay. Okay.
Andy: I’m like, oh, there’s this thing and there’s that thing. And someone has given me this objective and that objective and this other thing. And so, right. I’m gonna delegate out handling some of these objectives. I’m just gonna keep an oversight role.
At the same time, I’m supposed to be doing due diligences and I’ve got my one-on-ones and performance reviews. I’m supposed to be reviewing architecture and coaching lead engineers. I’ve got to do, man. Come on. You gonna say I can’t delegate?
Mon-Chaio: I love that you started with this and the thing that I think is interesting is you, you can’t see Andy’s face. I can you were a little sheepish about bringing this up and then you did use the word, you know, it’s probably a bad reason. I like that because I do feel like that’s the situation most, if not all, people that are delegating are in. And so to hear you say, well, you know, I’m a little sheepish about min, and I don’t think that’s the right reason to delegate. I’d love to hear more about that.
Andy: Well, to me, and part of this comes from, we did discuss this a little bit and you brought this up and I was like reflecting as we were speaking here on like, why have I, well, it’s actually been that reason that we were talking about,
Mon-Chaio: Mm.
Andy: and the, the thing is, is that if I’ve got too much work and all I’m gonna do is start flowing down, that too much work to more people.
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.
Andy: There needs to be some other pressure. That means that it’s not too much work for everyone. And somehow, in most organizations, I think that’s what it ends up being, is it ends up being, so much comes out that the delegation turns into way more work than anyone can handle.
And so I think we need to get back to that. Why,
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.
Andy: why do we delegate?
And on each one of those, if maybe that back pressure went back why should I delegate this?
Well, if the only reason is I’ve got too much work, not that there’s a better person to do this, not that I need to train up someone.
I have too much work,
It’s not really advancing the organization or advancing the people. It’s just kind of passing the buck,
Mon-Chaio: Right. And I would say actually it’s even more insidious than just passing the buck. I think there’s a huge equity issue here. When I talk about delegation, I like to kind of start at the top, at like the ceo o right? Think about, a 5,000 person company. The CEO always has too much to do.
Perhaps there’s, they’re a series B and their investors, or their board is giving them a lot of pressure to do X, Y, and Z, right? And so he wants to do more than he can do. Let’s say his capacity is 120% of what he can do. So then he ends up doing what you talked about, the busyness delegation of, I will delegate some things down, right?
And then shit flows downhill. And so it goes down, down, down. And the problem with that, I think, is often people at the top are the ones for who’s saying no causes the least, not only political backlash, but also in terms of just personal circumstances. They’re the ones most able to withstand any sort of backlash.
So what do I mean by that? So when the CEO says, no, The board basically oftentimes trusts him. And so they can say, oh, well okay, you know, we’re not gonna push you into it or whatever. And the CEO knows that generally he’s not gonna get fired for saying no. And if he does get fired, I mean, I’m generalizing here, but it’s probably gonna be more okay for the CEO than for, you know, somebody who makes one 10th, a hundred a thousandth of what the CEO makes per year.
Right, in terms of salary and whatnot. And I think the same thing for the level under the ceo, the VPs, and then, you know, the senior VPs and then the VPs, and then the senior directors and the directors or whatever. I generally think those folks have a lot more ability to say no and a lot less consequences for that both professionally and personally. Where the equity issue comes in for me is we get to this level. Where the shit flows, where all of a sudden the people don’t feel comfortable saying no for both professional and for personal reasons, right? Perhaps they really want to get promoted. Perhaps they really need the money for the job, right?
Maybe they’re sending money overseas or they have you know, some sort of sick child or something at home. And those folks are then forced in some ways to accumulate more and more of this load because they don’t feel comfortable pushing back. And so that’s where I think the equity comes in.
Andy: And in those kinds of situations, they aren’t getting any kind of modeling from the leadership that it is allowable to say no.
And so it goes all the way down. And, and then essentially that since they’ve never seen anyone say no or experience that it’s kind of like the message is you don’t get to say no, you don’t get to kind of try to change what that direction is that might reduce that kind of thing because you said that’s the least consequential at those higher levels.
Another way of viewing it is it’s the most consequential because their actions are so highly leveraged at the cpo, cto VP engineering, those kinds of levels,
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.
Andy: what they decide impacts so many people that when they say no, that actually impacts a large number of people.
Mon-Chaio: right. Absolutely. And it’s interesting, I think I have worked with a lot of good leaders before and even more bad leaders or average leaders, but I don’t think I have ever seen a leader model saying no to delegation. I’m not even sure what that would look like. I feel like delegation is often hidden, right?
Like if my boss tells me to do something and I say, no, you know, how do my folks know that? I say no unless I like celebrate it in a one-on-one or in an all hands or whatever. Look at how many things I said no to. Is that it? Or is there some way better to sort of model that?
Andy: So I, I think it wouldn’t be quite celebration there. To me, a lot of this delegation we should, now I think we can get to a bit to the, when, when does the
it’s gonna happen ad hoc whenever, but at least at this level that we’re kind of talking about of objectives and Tasks, if we’re talking about like quarterly OKRs or a process like that, it’s gonna happen in the setting of all of those kind of delegation through everything’s going to happen.
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.
Andy: And there the saying no is a completely discussable and should be a discussed thing about, well, these are the aims that were being discussed. This was our feedback on it. I ended up saying, yeah, we can’t do that. So been cut down from this and this one has been modified in this way to compensate.
And so it becomes a discussion about how did the how did the framing of the work, how did the definition of all the work modify through saying no.
Mon-Chaio: Think that that does come across, I don’t know if I consider a lot of that delegation.
Andy: Okay.
I think of OKRs as an alignment thing, but it’s also a delegation thing. It’s, this is my level of the objectives and it gets split up into all these parts and your level of the objective and it gets split up into these parts.
But I can also understand that most of the time when we talk about delegation, it’s a much more task specific type thing.
Mon-Chaio: I think it would be different if it was like, Hey, these are OKRs owned at my level that I’m responsible for, but instead of me being responsible for one of them, you are gonna be responsible for one of them. Versus these are, OKRs is at my level, and then there’s a sub KR that you contribute to that helps me achieve my kr.
At least that’s differing in my mind. Does it, does that differ in your mind or are those kind of the same?
Andy: I think they’re kind of the same to me.
Mon-Chaio: Hmm. Okay.
Andy: I think I see it fractally, man. gotta, just gotta eat some mushrooms and then it all becomes same. It’s all interconnected man
Mon-Chaio: It’s Doug Forcett, you know for those who watch the Good Place I think where I see something that’s more concretely delegated, and I wouldn’t even call this a task, is I would say out of band initiatives
Tied to OKRs.
I don’t know if this happens at smaller companies as well as bigger companies. I haven’t been in a smaller company for almost 10 years now. So, you know, my memory is completely forgotten. And so smaller companies seem great to me, right? Cuz I only remember the good things
Andy: They don’t have any problems.
Mon-Chaio: right.
Absolutely. But I’ll give you an example from a few years ago in, in an org that I worked in. What the leader wanted to do was they wanted to revamp the manager onboarding process for their organization. And so it was for their organization, and it was about how do we get managers into our culture?
How do we teach managers the way that we want them to manage and whatnot? And that was a task that belonged to them, but they ended up delegating out to somebody else.
That’s an example, a more classical example when I think about delegation.
Andy: So let’s talk about that kind of delegation, that kind of like task-based delegation. Something very specific is coming down. And it kind of gets turned into, well this was mine, but actually I’m not gonna do it. So Mon-Chaio, you report to me, you do it. And then maybe man cha, you have people who report to you and maybe you split it up among them.
What’s a good way to go about that? If we accept it’s going to happen? Cuz it happens at small companies too.
Mon-Chaio: Okay, good.
Andy: time.
Mon-Chaio: The guidance that I use is twofold. I think the first thing is, I don’t think you should ever delegate in order to reduce load on yourself. This is a really tricky thing, which I think we can talk about for a while, but delegation always reduces some of your load, right? That’s for sure.
And you, you hope, right?
Maybe
Andy: it, could be that you’re delegating for a different reason and it actually increases your load.
Mon-Chaio: True. True. Especially when we start to talk about those readiness quadrants, right? If you have to do a ton of mentorship or whatnot, maybe it does actually increase your load. So that’s a good point. The other thing is you talked about doing higher leverage work, and I absolutely believe in that, right?
I think , when managers stop doing, or when leaders stop doing things that other people can do and do things that only they can do that is much higher leverage work and much more impactful. And so,
Andy: for our listeners, can you think of a specific example of something that would be higher leverage work that they might consider? I need to do that and so I should delegate this other thing, like coming up with a revised management onboarding.
Mon-Chaio: Yeah, absolutely. Well I won’t use the revised management onboarding thing but I was just talking about this to some other folks. Giving people guidance. A lot of managers, especially new managers, end up in the background evaluating all the work that’s being done on their team.
Right. And the bad ones or the beginning ones make it seem like micromanagement and their team has, Hey, stop it. You’re micromanaging us. But insidiously the good ones who have gotten to the top of their ability but haven’t quite gotten to the next level ability are able to do that without their team feeling like it’s micromanagement.
Andy: They see, they feel it’s more of a collaborative thing where their manager’s trying to understand and support rather than micromanage.
Mon-Chaio: Or what I see a lot is managers will read docs at night when nobody’s in the docs. They’ll review code at night when nobody’s around, and then they won’t like push them as if I reviewed them. But they’ll, you know, have a different method of trying to influence that process after they’ve done that.
Right. And a lot of these managers spend, a lot of these leaders spend a lot of time doing that. We’ll talk about maybe a little bit of this about, you know, what else you can do when we talk about delegation and how you keep things on track. But they do that. And so my counseling to these folks often is the highest, the higher leverage work you can do is instead of thinking about how do you get this individual thing better and that individual thing better, is to think on a systems level.
On what structures and processes I can put in place such that I no longer am required to read docs at night. You know, I often talk about pure accountability versus manager accountability. How can I get my directs to be accountable within themselves more? So I feel comfortable to remove myself from that you know, from that accountability chain.
So that’s an example of something that, you know, you can do less of in order to do higher leverage work.
Andy: So coaching people up to be able to act at that higher level where you can step out the way, you’re no longer the intermediary and now you’re managing the system rather than managing the people, which is really what we really want to be getting to is the people can handle themselves
some help.
Sometimes you people need help. Everyone needs help, but what we wanna get to is everyone can handle themselves and you are there to help them put together the system that they need.
Mon-Chaio: Right. Absolutely.
Andy: And so the higher leverage activity is getting more to work on that.
Mon-Chaio: Right, right. Cool. That was actually a really good digression, I think. I think that’s probably helpful for at least some subset of our listeners, so that’s great. Getting back into, you know, guidance for delegation. I was mentioning that the one I was talking about first was not to redo, don’t delegate to reduce load on yourself. And so that’s a little tricky bit, right? Because, you know, in order to do higher leverage work, you could say reducing load on yourself in order to get space to do higher leverage work. But I think it’s a little bit of a different mindset. I think the mindset that I would say is, oh, I’m delegating because I have 120% of capacity, and that puts me back at a hundred percent capacity and whatnot. And then the second thing is willingness. And so that’s why I kind of tapped into that situational leadership willingness. And so I like that we changed it to you know, confidence instead of willingness, because I don’t believe in delegating to somebody who’s unwilling.
And it is very important for leaders to read the person that they’re delegating to because of the equity issue that I mentioned earlier. Very often people will say yes, but they don’t mean yes.
Andy: So that, gets actually to one of the other readiness levels, which is that they’re willing or confident, but unable.
And it could be that they, they’re not actually willing and they’re masking it with that, or it could they are willing and unable and you mistake it for willing and able.
Which gets to, I think a technique people can use that’s this concept of briefing and back briefing.
Mon-Chaio: Okay.
Andy: And this comes, this comes from the Prussian military of the late 18 hundreds. And
Mon-Chaio: The Prussians have entered the podcast folks,
Andy: and it comes from their particular approach to tactics and the Prussian military in the 18 hundreds. For those of you who are not history buffs is the military that completely trounced what was considered the greatest military of its time. So the Prussian military destroyed the French military and took over France in the matter of, I think, less than a year.
And this was in about 1870.
They just kind of rolled through and the French military was considered the best military at the time. And the question is, how did they do this? And one of the answers not, the only answer, one of the answers is that they had changed their command structure and they change their command structure to be one based on what’s called Auftragtaktik.
What they do is they give very high level guidance down their chain of command.
And apparently they were known for very short commands getting sent down
that would say, this is the situation, this is the goal, this is why we have that goal,
this is the enemy’s positioning and everything else.
And then they would just make sure that the level below them understood that by one, repeating it back to them, sure that they actually understood it actually heard it.
And two, asking them for a bit of a like, so what’s your plan going to be?
Because then the person delegating, which is what they’re doing, they’re delegating all of this decision making, which is what you’re often doing when you’re delegating.
They pass down and they say, okay, tell me how you’re thinking about this and what you might do.
And if they come back with something completely insane, that doesn’t at all match what the command structure thought that they were asking for. And let’s talk about this some more because that’s, not what we thought we asked for.
forth a bit. And it’s to get to that common understanding, that alignment on approach or alignment on goal, and the necessity for like, when are you gonna need to check in so that we can.
Command other units to do the appropriate things and, and get that information go on. And so it would be that kind of whole thing. And what they did was they essentially pushed decision making, which the French army hadn’t done. They pushed decision making all the way down into their, like, individual squads or something.
And so it was kind of in a way like organized chaos.
The individual Prussian Army units would suddenly change approach because the battlefield situation changed. And they had all been trained on, well, we’ve been given the overall goal, so we’re just gonna work towards it. But all through that they would of course be communicating back up and communicating back down, but they wouldn’t get stuck on it.
So I would say that’s another tactic. Speaking of tactics, another tactic for delegation is saying not only just the task, but the context for it, the goal you have with it. Setting up any constraints you have and then asking the person about, okay, now what do you think you’re gonna do with that?
Let’s make sure we’re both on the same page here.
Mon-Chaio: I like it. Did you say that’s called pressure back pressure or what was
Andy: briefing and back briefing.
The briefing is what the command person says, and the back briefing is what then the subordinate gives back.
Mon-Chaio: I like it. And I think this may, like we, I think we will eventually want to touch on in this episode, you know, how do you know what’s going on as you delegate, right. But I think interestingly, and I’m reading this with a bias, this is the first time I’ve heard this story. And so, but obviously I have a bias in how I read it.
It sounds like the back briefing was to make sure that these AAA teams, as I call them, right, these squads or whatever, aligned on the goal.
It wasn’t so much to pressure test the individual tactics that they were saying they were gonna execute. Oh, you know, I think our plan is to go over here and then I’m gonna like make this flank maneuver.
It felt like leadership might disagree with that tactic, but they’re like, oh, you’re doing that tactic because you understand the goal. Okay, I’m not gonna like, you know, I’m not gonna push on that and like poke it cuz you have AAA and as long as you understand the goal
Andy: Yeah, that is absolutely it. You’re not interested in telling someone how to do it.
Mon-Chaio: This is so interesting because I feel like those lessons have been forgotten. I have worked for two large organizations who I think they would claim that they are some of the models in sort of bottoms up leadership or bottoms up the working from the bottoms up, right? For example, they would say, look it’s very clear that the majority of our work items every quarter come from the individual engineers.
They don’t, you know, it’s not PMs coming and saying, Hey, here’s 60% of your, you know, there’s just 60% of your backlog. Now you can do 40%. No, it’s like 80% of the backlog is ideas generated from the bottom. And they would call that bottoms up. But I don’t think leadership tends to function in that way.
Even in these bottom up organizations, there’s very much of a, well, we’re gonna align on not just the goal, but the specific
Andy: The implementation.
Mon-Chaio: of the goal, right? Oh So these are the OKRs you’re designed to meet. And what you’ve proposed to me are these six projects. And I will tell you, I don’t believe in this project.
Why don’t you go do this project and you know, you get to ultimately decide, but then during execution, if any of those projects change, I need to know, and I don’t need to know because I don’t think you understand the goal. I need to know, because I might not agree that those projects changing is gonna meet the goal the way that you think it’s gonna meet the goal.
Andy: And I can understand where it comes from
Because it’s, it, some ways it’s much easier to reason off of a specific, rather accept that we have , to the best of our knowledge, The same understanding
and I need to trust. A nuance in this structure as well, though, I should be clear, is not everything is done by this structure.
They do sometimes give out just like, here’s your order. You’re, you’re going to do that. But it’s kind of like a continuum. So another thing to keep in mind on this is what you were saying, which is that it’s not about that exact implementation. In fact, the questioning from the delegator standpoint should be to check this kind of like problem of knowledge. There’s a specific name for it that I’m blanking on at the moment.
But we’ll put it in the show notes. And the problem is that when you understand the situation, you actually kind of lose what you need to communicate for another person to understand the situation. Because you take for granted so many of those aspects that you now just understand that it’s unclear what you actually need to communicate.
And so the back briefing is more of a check on yourself.
It’s a check to make sure that you are not falling victim to this problem of knowledge.
Mon-Chaio: Yeah, it’s a lot like, or I interpret it as a lot, like, you know, when you think you know something, you try to teach it. And when you try to teach it, then you know how much, you know. Is it, do you think about it like that too? Or is that two different things to you?
Andy: Here, let, let me actually pull it up right now. I just found it cursive knowledge. That’s what it’s called.
Mon-Chaio: Cursive, like the script writing cursive.
Andy: Sorry. Curse of knowledge.
Mon-Chaio: Oh, curse of knowledge. Okay.
Andy: So it’s a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual communicating with other individuals. Unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand.
So you can about this like in a, in a large organization you are in the middle of this organization and you’re communicating that we need to create a new billing system. And yeah, we’re creating this new billing system. So you’ve set up some standards around it and you say, kind of this is the shape it needs to take.
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.
Andy: You never said The reason we’re creating this new billing system is because the old one’s gonna get shut off in two months.
And then the, person says back to you. Okay, well, so we are going to assess some other billing system, see if we can some get something off the shelf.
We’ll look around we’ll start looking at Stripe and maybe some other things for taking credit card payments and yeah, that’s good. And then you say, oh, and how long might that take? And you say, oh, well, we probably will finish up sometime next quarter. So six months.
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And now I’ve just learned, I forgot to say that the old system has to get shut off in two months.
Mon-Chaio: Right?
Andy: All right? Yes. I left out something
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.
Andy: changes the situation drastically, so it,
Mon-Chaio: Right. And so you’re saying that back pressure is really to help, or, sorry, back briefing is really to help with this curse of knowledge problem, or at least can really help with this cursive knowledge problem.
Andy: Yeah. It’s about checking, in fact here it’s leadership checking whether they have described their intent with enough clarity. And because of the curse of knowledge, it’s impossible for them to know whether or not they’ve described enough clarity. Sometimes.
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it absolutely does not say it is for leadership to make sure execution is on track.
say that. So do you think that there’s ever a case where that ladder statement that I made is a good use of back briefing? I was gonna say pressure again. I think it’s from ETL days or whatever.
Andy: Creating systems with back pressure.
Mon-Chaio: you’re right. Exactly. I’ll give you an interesting anecdote. I once had a manager who was very much into sort of diving into the details and being hands-on or whatever. And when I questioned her about why, what she mentioned was, while this company moves fast, and so I need to have knobs to be able to turn every week in order to make sure we’re going in the right direction. What do you think about that?
Andy: I think it makes sense,
Mon-Chaio: Okay.
Andy: but I, that also does, takes a very active role in something that that person doesn’t have immediate. Control over or necessarily clear knowledge of. So it actually goes against this. I can understand where they’re coming from. Absolutely. The situation’s constantly changing.
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Andy: But strangely enough, in a world with continuing on with this military metaphor now that we’re, now that we’re there in in a world with the fog of war and limited knowledge, trying to keep control on those minute details creates more problems than letting it go and radiating intent.
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Andy: And so , to me this question of like how do you keep up, up to date on progress is one of continuously radiating intent and essentially rechecking the briefing and the back briefing.
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Andy: And a way of thinking about that is, if you think about it in kind of like this serial pattern, Like, let’s take a programming metaphor.
You’ve got a manager process cuz hey, it works out for this.
Mon-Chaio: Right. Exactly.
Andy: and it’s going around and it’s checking all of its worker processes. And as, as it gets a feedback from each one about how it’s going, that manager process will change what it’s doing. It might decide to shut down a worker process because it didn’t check in in time.
This is gonna start sounding horrible for people, but I’m just gonna keep running with it. It might shut down a worker or it might spin up a few more because it notices all my workers are full. So it’s, in that briefing back briefing in a very simplistic sense that that process is doing that it comes up with that information.
And so like briefing back briefing is not a one-time thing. It’s not like you do it once at the beginning of the war and then you never brief anyone ever again.
Mon-Chaio: Right.
Andy: You’re, you’re briefing and you get back briefings. And those back briefings will also be just status updates. You might say, all right, we are still trying to take that hill.
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What’s your plan right now? What’s your situation? And you get back the response and you’re like, ah, okay. If that’s what’s going on there, I need to give a different briefing now to the people on the other side of the hill.
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Andy: And so to me, that’s what it is. It’s that constant back and forth of that giving nude instructions.
I think there is something though, in, in that description you gave that is a little different, it sounded like that person wanted, like intimate, like front of the coal face to mix even more metaphors into this,
uh, View of what’s happening. Is that right?
Mon-Chaio: Correct. Yes. Yes. And they wanted to ask, be able to ask detailed questions. Sometimes even, you know did you write this test you know, in, in this thing that you were executing or whatnot?
Andy: Yeah. And what’s your thought on that? Like how, how does that fit in for you?
Mon-Chaio: I get back as I do a lot into sort of these AAA organizations, I think first of all, I think the leader needs to be really explicit about whether they are granting AAA to certain set of people or a certain team or whatever or not. Because I think if not, then it makes a lot more sense for them to come in and say, look, you know you don’t have authority, autonomy, and accountability here.
I do. And so, you know, it is my job to come in and, you know, check things for you. Right? I still don’t think that’s quite the right thing, but I think it’s a lot more tolerable, think. The worst thing you can do is tell people that they have Triple A and then come in and act as if they don’t,
I have this big thing where I think no matter what level of leader you are, even if you’re cto if there’s a big problem that you need to be hands-on on, you should go to the source, right? I don’t think you should go to a middle manager and say, Hey, you know every four hours write me a status report that shows me red green around these.
I call that managing by dashboard. So if it’s important enough for you to disrupt workflow and interrupt people, go to the source. And so, yeah, if there was, you know, and in that, in one of the cases, it’s like we had this big regulatory outage where a bug was causing us to not submit things to a regulator, which meant that we could get fined or shut down, right?
That was absolutely really important for that leader to dive in was absolutely critical. And so I think in those cases, yeah, go down and tell me that my variable naming is wrong, and that by writing this loop that, you know, that’s gonna cause a race condition that’s gonna prevent things. Sure.
Absolutely. But I think, so I, I think those actions in certain cases are really, really important and aren’t done enough. And then I think those actions at the same time are critical that they not be done because they ero trust and are done a lot. So, yeah. So that’s what I, that’s what I think about those actions.
Andy: I think that those actions are very important,
And if done right can improve trust.
But it all has to fit within the wider tapestry. I’ll put it in yet another metaphor. The wider tapestry of the organization’s culture and the way work.
So for instance, in lean parlance, they have this thing called the gemba walk.
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Andy: Gemba is is this idea of go to the place, go to where things actually happen, don’t manage by dashboard, don’t by hearsay. Go and go and see what’s actually going on. And that fits into the larger culture, though, that Toyota, as the originator of these kinds of things
lean places have, which is one of everyone seeks to understand.
Everyone seeks to improve and learn. And actually the role of managers is on that system level. And their, their big role, the thing that they should be doing all the time, is paying attention to how can we learn? And so they’re there not to tell people that they’re wrong, but they’re there to understand where do they still need to coach. .
It’s to gather information for themselves about how should they take action. And so to me it all comes down to that, what’s that? What’s the culture of the place? Tell itself about what’s going on here?
Mon-Chaio: I think that concept of gemba walking to where things are happening is so, so important. I think a lot of even a lot of leaders who are pretty hands-on end up not going there.
Andy: Yeah
Mon-Chaio: you know, I I once had someone tell me like, you can’t tell my boss to go attend a standup to figure out what’s going on.
They’re too busy. my point was, well then it must not be important enough for them to dig into that granular level of detail. Right. So I think to me getting back to the question or bringing it back towards delegation, I think this has a good tie in on, you know, once you delegate, how do you make sure things are on track? Right. And I think it’s, To me, it’s a bit of a mix. But maybe I’ll start off by asking you, how do you think about that when you delegate? How do you make sure things are on track?
Andy: I think it’s a, it’s a combination of these things.
It’s that continual briefing and back briefing. So you’re hearing what are the updates? What’s the change situation? Where are we now?
And it’s doing the gemba walks, it’s going and watching the actual situation, the actual state using that as a way of understanding those back briefings.
I’m getting with a bit more context because. Because you can think, actually, I can think of it as one of the things you’re trying to deal with is the curse of knowledge in the other direction. So the back briefing from the briefing was to deal with the curse of knowledge. So you need to think about, okay, when you get that back briefing, how do you deal with the curse of knowledge from the other side?
And one way of doing it is to go and have other information and then try to fit this information together and ask questions and be like, but you’re saying that, I was just watching this the other day though.
Mon-Chaio: Yeah, I agree. And I also think that it’s quite a mix. I think you know, for me, in terms of AAA orgs, I tend to think about, you know, obviously the briefing part is really the OKRs, right? Or the goals that you’re trying to meet for the quarter or the half or whatever. And I think in the past processes that have worked for me is, again, a mix of both.
So, I would like to have every two week or every three week status updates we call those, you could call those briefing back briefing, where we get into a room with the leaders of each, you know, each aaa org and say, look, these are the goals as we’ve espoused them. What is the progress towards these goals?
Are you still confident in making these goals? And again, the intention obviously is to make sure things are up to date, but it’s also to get any information back that makes us realize as leaders that, oh, we haven’t communicated correctly.
But what I think is critical in this area is it is critical to not. To me anyway, to not have all this extra work that people end up doing. Oh, you have to prepare a one page writeup for every single project. And then you have to send those out for comment before our meeting. And then I’m gonna like talk about, oh, you know, I don’t think that you should be talking to this customer or you know, whatnot.
That is something that I personally disagree with. And so it should be lightweight. And so people should come having to do very little prep. And it should be more of a discussion around, are these goals getting met
Andy: I think we actually got finally an episode with some very clear tactics for people briefing and back briefing gemba walks situational leadership all great things for delegation. Also, don’t delegate because you’re overworked, delegate to open yourself up to higher leveraged activities.
Or delegate to improve the capabilities of those that you’re delegating to?
Mon-Chaio: Perfect. The one thing that I will add is when briefing, back briefing, and even during your gemba walks, Approach it with making sure we have a shared understanding versus are the tactics that you’re executing Correct. In my mind.
Let us know if you agree with that. Maybe you think that delegation should be used to reduce your workload. Maybe you have other processes and other methods of delegating and checking in that you felt have worked well and maybe you think we’re too naive that these idealistic ways of delegating and using the Prussian army as as a model is just doesn’t fit the real world.
We’d like to hear from you, and we’d like to know what you thought of this episode, so leave some comments and let us know.
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