3.6 The three failures

In everyday life. A dinner party can go wrong in three ways. Nobody told the cook about a guest's allergy, so the cook had no brief (skipping the first 10). You stood over the cook all evening (micromanaging the 80, which means doing too much in the middle). Nobody tasted the sauce before serving it (skipping the last 10). The table below shows the same three failures at work.

Brightline's October 1 showed all three.

Failure	What it looks like	Why people do it	What it costs	The fix
Skipping the first 10	A one-line request. No period, no limits, no stop rule, no evidence asked for	It feels faster. It is the habit of the chatbot era	The wrong deliverable, or the right one reached by the wrong means. Time saved at the start is lost to rework	Write the four parts and the five review questions. Save the brief as a template for next time
Micromanaging the 80	Approving every harmless step, feeding work in one item at a time, retyping drafts, steering each step	Low trust, often after one bad result	You become the operator again, and pay for the worker too	Move the worry into the first 10: a stop rule, narrower authority, or a smaller first task
Skipping the last 10	Accepting "Completed," forwarding work unread, approving because it looks professional	The output looks finished, and there is a lot of it	Often the costliest, because unchecked errors can reach vendors, customers or the books under your name	Read the flags first, then the evidence. A named person approves. Nothing leaves before that

(A deliverable is the result the worker hands over. Rework is doing the work again. The operator is the person who does the work by hand. The books are the company's accounting records.)

Maria (the office manager) shows the second failure, micromanaging the 80. She used the worker to build the invoice register for Friday's payments. She did not trust it, so she approved every step by hand. It took her 90 minutes, and doing the job by hand takes about 75.

Her caution was not wrong. Money was at risk, and two weeks earlier a fake email had almost tricked the company. Her mistake was where she put the caution. It belonged in the first 10 percent, as a stop rule in the brief. One example is "ask me before adding any invoice over $5,000." That rule gives the same protection, and she does not have to do the work twice.

When a delegation goes wrong, find where to look first (which of the three parts broke) before you fix anything. Failures can combine, so treat what the questions point to as a starting point, not the only cause. Ask three questions in order.

Did the brief, contract or policy say it? Check the brief, the Role Contract and any policy the worker was given. If none of them told it the period (which month), the limit or when to stop, start with the first 10 percent.
Did the worker act against them? If it acted beyond what the brief, contract or policy allowed, or did not stop when a rule applied, start with the middle. Look at the worker's record of the run, and at its inputs and permissions. Chapter 11 teaches that diagnosis (how to find the cause).
Was the problem visible in the evidence? If the warning was there and nobody read it, start with the final 10: fix the review, not the worker. If the problem was not visible, find out why. The review contract may have asked for too little evidence (a first-10 fix). The worker may have left out evidence it was asked for (a middle-80 fix). Or a source may have been wrong (fixed in the inputs).

Figure 3.3. Where to look first. Three questions, asked in order, point to the first place to investigate. Failures can combine.

Important

The three failures at Brightline

Dave (the controller who runs Brightline's accounting) gave the worker a one-line request at 9 a.m. The table he got back was a first-10 failure, because nothing told the worker that this task must change nothing.

Maria's 11 a.m. register was a middle-80 failure, caused by the person rather than the worker. The three questions would not find it, because her register was correct. This failure shows up as time, not as errors. If a delegated task takes you as long as doing it by hand, look at what you did during the middle.

At 4 p.m. Dave attached the worker's result to the month-end close (the paperwork that closes September's accounts) without reading it. The worker had flagged a typing error in the register, which later underpaid the vendor by $270. Not reading the result was a final-10 failure. The worker did its job, and the reviewer did not.

None of Brightline's three failures was the worker's. All three came from how people briefed, watched or reviewed.

Check yourself

A one-line request returns a tidy table built by changing data. Which part broke?