What stopped
The thirty-eight, in order
Every removal written down during one eleven-week transition to a four-day week, with the week it stopped and what became of it.
The monthly slide deck nobody presented
week 1 · still not missed
Printed copies of the weekly rota
week 0 · asked back after 1 week
The daily stand-up
week 0 · crept back after 3 weeks
Reading supplier contracts before renewalTwo renewals went through on terms nobody had read
week 2 · surfaced after 22 weeks
Not missed 1Crept back 1Asked back 1Surfaced 1
Four removals were written down with the week each of them stopped. One of them has not been asked for in the 78 weeks since. Of the rest, one was asked back, one crept back and one surfaced as a problem. One removal of each of the four kinds, from the thirty-eight counted here.
The monthly slide deck nobody presented
week 1 · still not missed
The suggestion box
week 6 · still not missed
Printed copies of the weekly rota
week 0 · asked back after 1 week
Visits to the two furthest sites
week 7 · asked back after 12 weeks
The daily stand-up
week 0 · crept back after 3 weeks
Keeping the induction folder up to dateNobody can say who restarted it
week 8 · crept back after 29 weeks
The standing slot for work with no owner
week 5 · surfaced after 14 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
Not missed 2Crept back 2Asked back 2Surfaced 2
Eight removals were written down with the week each of them stopped. Two of them have not been asked for in the 78 weeks since. Of the rest, two were asked back, two crept back and two surfaced as a problem. One more line is not drawn because the week it came back was left blank, and an interval with no end would be drawn as one that never ended. One more line is not drawn because it stopped outside the 11 weeks of the transition, and this record is of the transition. Eight of the thirty-eight, with two lines the panel refuses.
A four-day week is not a change of attitude. It is a subtraction, and the subtraction is specific: thirty-eight named things stopped happening in this organisation over eleven weeks.
The full list is the panel above, in short form. What follows is the shape of it — what sort of things these were, how they were spaced, and what the list does and does not let you conclude.
The removals are not exotic
Nobody stopped doing the work. What stopped was the apparatus around the work: a second signature, a weekly circulation, a standing slot in a diary, a printed copy of something that also existed on a screen.
Thirty-four of the thirty-eight are procedures. Four are events.
This is the ordinary texture of a working week in any organisation of about ninety people, and it is why the list is more interesting than it first looks. Not one of these things was obviously wasteful. Each had been introduced by somebody, usually in response to something going wrong, and each had survived every previous review on the grounds that it was cheap and it might be needed one day.
That is the honest position at the start of a shorter week. You are not looking at a pile of waste. You are looking at a pile of precautions, every one of which was reasonable when it was taken, and you have to decide which ones you are now going to stop taking.
They happened fast and together
| weeks of the transition | removals |
|---|---|
| 0 to 3 | 15 |
| 4 to 7 | 13 |
| 8 to 11 | 10 |
Eleven weeks is not long in which to take thirty-eight things out of a week, and that compression is what makes the record legible at all.
In ordinary circumstances an organisation removes a procedure every few months. Each removal is its own small decision, argued on its own merits, and they never form a set that anybody could look at side by side. Nobody says "we have now stopped doing thirty-eight things; which of them are we going to regret?" because the thirty-eight are spread over six years and nobody is counting.
A shorter week forces them into a single quarter. The list exists because the removals happened at once, and the shape of what follows is visible for the same reason.
Four things can happen next
Each entry carries one of four outcomes, assigned later rather than at the time:
- Not missed. Fourteen of the thirty-eight. Nobody requested it, nobody reinstated it, and nothing went wrong that anybody traced to its absence in seventy-eight weeks.
- Crept back. Eleven. The thing reappeared without anyone deciding that it should, at a median of seven weeks.
- Asked back. Eight. Somebody requested it in so many words, at a median of three weeks.
- Surfaced. Five. Its absence showed up as a problem, at a median of thirty-one weeks.
The four are not degrees of one thing. The first three are all forms of information arriving quickly enough to act on. The fourth is information failing to arrive until the cost has already been paid.
The column that cannot be derived
The argument of this whole site is that the fourth column cannot be worked out from the first three.
Look at any single row of the panel with the outcome covered up. You have a description, a week number, and in most cases a sentence of context. Nothing in that is enough. A removal made in week two with a one-line description and no objection may be the one that costs you fourteen months later, and on this record four of the five that did were exactly that.
The obvious predictors all fail. Size does not work: the biggest thing on the list by hours consumed was the monthly deck, and nobody has mentioned it since. Age does not work: two of the oldest procedures went quietly and stayed gone, while something introduced eighteen months earlier was back inside a fortnight. Seniority of the person who introduced it does not work either, in either direction.
What the panel refuses to draw
Two lines in the panel above are present in the data and absent from the picture, and the reason is printed under it.
One of them stopped in week fourteen, which is outside the eleven weeks of the transition. It may well have been a consequence of the shorter week, but it is not part of this record, and drawing it would push the left edge of the picture past the thing the picture is for.
The other was marked as having crept back with the week left blank. An interval with no end would be drawn exactly like one that never ended — which is to say, the missing field would have silently turned into the opposite claim. It is better to show thirty-seven lines and say why the thirty-eighth is missing.
That rule is applied everywhere on this site, and it is the reason several panels show fewer rows than they are given.
What this list is not
It is one organisation, one transition, one list kept by one person who was not keeping it in order to prove anything. The distribution of outcomes on somebody else's list would be different, and so would the lags.
What travels is not the numbers. It is the practice of writing the removals down as they happen, which costs about an hour, and then looking at the list again when enough time has passed for it to say something.
Also on what stopped and when anyone noticed