The quiet ones
The four quiet ones
The four removals nobody said a word about, all of which later surfaced as problems — what each one was, why nobody spoke, and what would have been said if.
The quarterly reconciliation of the project ledger
week 3 · surfaced after 31 weeks
Shadowing new starters through their first week
week 6 · surfaced after 47 weeks
Reading supplier contracts before renewal
week 2 · surfaced after 22 weeks
Logging why a job was turned down
week 9 · surfaced after 64 weeks
Surfaced 4
Four removals were written down with the week each of them stopped. Every one of them produced an event inside the 78 weeks watched. Of these, four surfaced as a problem. The four removals nobody said a word about, all of which later surfaced as problems.
Reading supplier contracts before renewalTwo renewals went through on terms nobody had read
week 2 · surfaced after 22 weeks
The quarterly reconciliation of the project ledgerAn audit asked for a year of figures and nobody could assemble them inside a fortnight
week 3 · surfaced after 31 weeks
Shadowing new starters through their first weekThree of the four people who joined that year left inside eight months
week 6 · surfaced after 47 weeks
Logging why a job was turned downThe same reason for refusing was worked out from scratch four times
week 9 · surfaced after 64 weeks
Surfaced 4
Four removals were written down with the week each of them stopped. Every one of them produced an event inside the 78 weeks watched. Of these, four surfaced as a problem. Four of the seventeen about which nothing was said at the time.
Four removals on this record went without a single word being said and later cost the organisation something. They are the core of the finding, so it is worth setting out what each was and what the silence consisted of.
The contracts
Reading supplier contracts before renewal. Removed in week two on the grounds that the terms were on file.
Nobody said anything because the statement was true. The terms were on file and could be looked up at any time by anybody. There was no counter-argument available in the room, because the counter-argument is not about the terms but about the act — that a thing nobody is scheduled to do does not get done, however available it is.
That is an awkward argument to make and it sounds like a slur on one's colleagues. Nobody made it. Two renewals later it was correct.
The reconciliation
Quarterly reconciliation of the project ledger. Removed in week three, by somebody outside the team, because the figures appeared elsewhere.
Nobody from the team was in the room. Nobody who was in the room knew that the reconciliation was where the figures were assembled rather than where they were reported.
The silence here was straightforward absence, and the missing sentence was a matter of fact rather than of judgement: that is where the numbers get built. Anybody who did the work could have said it in five seconds.
The shadowing
New starters spent their first week sitting next to somebody doing the job. It stopped in week six, and it stopped without being proposed — the people who would have been sat beside no longer had a spare day.
Nobody said anything because there was no meeting. It was never a procedure, had no name, and appeared on no list until somebody added it retrospectively. You cannot object to something that nobody has announced.
This is the costliest entry on the record and the one with the least documentation, and the relationship between those two facts is not accidental.
The log
Why jobs were turned down, recorded in a few lines. Stopped in week nine, also without being proposed — it lived in a Friday-afternoon habit, and Friday afternoon was the day that went.
Nobody said anything for the same reason. There was also, uniquely on this record, nobody for whom its absence produced any inconvenience whatever. Each person who refused a job worked out the reasoning themselves, found it a reasonable amount of work, and had no way of knowing that three other people had done the same.
Sixty-four weeks later somebody noticed the pattern. There was no earlier moment at which it could have been noticed.
What the four have in common
Two of the four were never proposed. Two of the four were proposed in rooms without anybody who did the work. All four had no visible output, which meant there was nothing to point at. And in all four cases the sentence that would have saved the organisation money was available to somebody and was not said.
| removal | why nobody spoke | the missing sentence |
|---|---|---|
| contracts | the stated reason was true | "nobody is scheduled to do it" |
| reconciliation | nobody who did it was present | "that is where the numbers get built" |
| shadowing | never proposed | "that is how new people learn this" |
| refusal log | never proposed, and nobody was inconvenienced | "we will each work this out again" |
Three of the four missing sentences are factual. Only one requires anybody to have made a judgement or taken a risk.
What would have caught them
Two cheap checks, neither of which requires anybody to be perceptive.
"Who here has done this?" — asked before a removal is agreed. Catches the reconciliation directly, and would probably have caught the contracts, since the person who read them annually would have said what reading them actually involved.
"What did you used to do on the day that went?" — asked of each team a month after the transition. Catches the shadowing and the log, both of which were invisible precisely because they were never decisions.
Between them, two questions that take an afternoon address all four of the unremarked problems on this record. That is the whole practical content of this part of the site, and the reason it is worth the four pages around it is that neither question is obvious until you have seen the list.
The fifth problem, which was not quiet
The standing slot for ownerless work is the only one of the five problems about which somebody said something at the time, and it is worth separating out because it tests the account.
It was questioned, not argued about. Somebody asked what the hour was for. The answer given in the room was that it was a catch-all, which is accurate and sounds like a description of a meeting with no purpose.
So the question was asked, an answer was given, and the answer made the removal more likely rather than less.
That is the limit of the mechanism described on this page. A question creates a weak watcher, and a weak watcher reported at fourteen weeks — faster than any of the four silent ones and much slower than the argued removals.
It also shows that asking is not sufficient. The information that would have saved the hour was not that it was a catch-all but what it caught, and nobody in the room could have said, because nobody in the room had been in it.