Two quarters missed. Same team, same targets, same people who had hit them comfortably the year before.
By the second quarter Ben had a theory, and the theory was that the team had gotten comfortable. He had started building the case — noting start times, watching who left at five, drafting the outline of a conversation with HR about two people in particular.
(A composite. The pattern is real; the company isn’t.)
Before he had that conversation, he ran the checklist. Mostly to be able to say he had.
What the checklist asks
Time is not a resource. It’s a constraint — everyone gets the same amount, and nobody can add to it. Which means when a team’s output falls and the hours haven’t changed, the answer is in one of three other places:
– What constraint are they working under that they weren’t before? – What resources do they have, or have lost? – How much room to decide do they actually have?
Effort is not on that list. It can be the answer, but it’s the last place to look, not the first — and it is the only one of the four that makes a manager feel righteous, which is exactly why it gets reached for first.
What he found
Eight months earlier the company had rolled out a new scanning system. Genuinely good technology: it captured and validated intake data automatically, and it was faster and more accurate than what anyone had been doing by hand.
Nobody had retired the old verification step.
So the team was scanning each item into the new system — and then opening the legacy sheet and re-keying the same fields for the second check, because that step had never been removed from the standard work. The new system validated it. Then a person validated it again, against the system that had just validated it.
Roughly nine minutes per item, on somewhere around sixty items a day.
Nobody had complained, for a reason worth sitting with: it had been introduced as an addition, not a replacement, and the team assumed the redundancy was deliberate. Somebody upstairs must want the double check. It wasn’t their call to make.
That’s the third question on the list. Room to decide. They didn’t have any.
Why this is an accountability story and not a process story
The instinct to look at effort first is not laziness. It’s that effort is the only explanation where the manager isn’t implicated.
A constraint nobody removed, a resource nobody adjusted, a decision nobody was allowed to make — all three of those point back up the org chart. Ben was two signatures away from firing people for a bottleneck he had installed.
Accountability starts with the leader inspecting their own inputs first. Not as a moral posture. As a diagnostic sequence, because it is where the answer usually is.
Where to start this week
Run the three questions before the effort question. Constraint, resources, decision room. Write down an actual answer for each before you allow yourself an opinion about the team.
Ask what changed eight months ago. Performance drops rarely coincide with the thing you’re looking at. Look at what was introduced two or three quarters before the numbers moved.
Ask the team what they’d stop doing. Not what’s hard — what’s redundant. People will tell you instantly, and they usually haven’t told you because nobody made it their call.
More on this is in Chapter 3 — Architecting Sustainability of Firm Foundations. The framework is laid out in The Triangle of Control.
Working on this with a real team and want a second set of eyes? Start a conversation, or book a 30-minute call. No pitch — just a look at what you are actually dealing with.
Leave a Reply