The cost of guessing
Waiting for permission you already had
The waiting and the rework have the same cause. In both, a fact that already existed somewhere failed to reach the person who needed it.
Decisions this page is about, and where the line actually was
Changing the wording on a customer-facing error message
4 → 1It had been yours all along
Refunding a customer under fifty pounds
3 → 1A written policy you had never been shown
Telling a customer a date
3 → 6Dates are committed by one person here
Reordering your own week
4 → 1You asked twice before believing the answer
- 1Decide it alone and say nothing
- 2Decide it alone and mention it afterwards
- 3Check with one colleague first
- 4Check with the person who assigned it
- 5Needs a decision one level up
- 6Cannot be decided here at all
four decisions · three of them you had more room than you thought · one gave you less · the median gap was three steps on the scale
Four of the nine decisions counted on this site.
Before adding another approval step, it helps to open the official resource and check whether unclear ownership or missing context is the real source of delay.
For additional reading outside this collection, see material published by ISO.
Three returns where the missing thing was known to somebody the whole time
The signup flow
1 stage backIt went back because a rule existed that nobody mentioned.
The vendor handover
1 stage backIt went back because a previous attempt had failed for a reason nobody passed on.
The import rewrite
2 stages backIt went back because the constraint on downtime was never stated. It had been agreed with a customer two years earlier
- 1the brief
- 2the plan
- 3the build
- 4review
- 5shipped
three pieces of work came back · the median went back one stage · the furthest went back two
Three of the six returns counted on this site, chosen because in each the fact that caused the return already existed and was held by somebody.
The three returns above have a property worth isolating: in each case the fact that caused the return was not discovered, derived or decided. It already existed. Somebody held it the whole time.
A rule about the signup flow, known to everybody there more than a year. A previous attempt at the vendor handover, known to whoever watched it fail. A downtime limit agreed with a customer two years earlier, written in a contract somebody could have pointed at.
None of those had to be worked out. They had to be transmitted, and they were not.
The same failure as the unnecessary ask
This is the connection worth making, because the two costs look unrelated and are the same thing.
When somebody escalates a decision they could have made, a fact exists — "that one is yours" — and has not reached them. When work comes back because a rule was not mentioned, a fact exists and has not reached them. Identical mechanism, different symptom.
The symptoms differ only in timing. An untransmitted fact about authority produces a delay at the start. An untransmitted fact about the work produces a return at the end. Which one you get depends on whether the person decided to ask or decided to proceed.
That also explains something that otherwise looks like a paradox: the cautious person and the decisive person, working from the same thin brief, produce different failures of about the same size.
Why transmission fails for existing facts
The fact has no owner. Nobody is responsible for the rule about the signup flow; it is simply true, and things that are simply true have nobody assigned to telling anybody.
It has no trigger. There is no moment that prompts somebody to mention a constraint from two years ago. The only trigger is somebody about to violate it, and by then the work exists.
And it does not feel like information. This is the curse of knowledge again: to the holder it is not a fact about the work but a property of the world.
What makes an existing fact findable
Three things, in descending order of how realistic they are.
Put it where the work is. A rule about the signup flow belongs in the signup flow — a comment, a line in the readme, a note on the ticket template. Not in a policy document, which nobody opens, and not in anybody's memory.
Give it a date and a reason. "Ten minutes maximum, contractual, agreed 2023" is findable and checkable. "Keep downtime short" is advice and will be overridden by the first person with a good argument.
Say it when it nearly bites. The moment somebody proposes something that would have violated it is the cheapest moment to write it down, and the only moment anybody remembers it exists.
The two halves of the same quarter
Put the two costs side by side for the record counted on this site and the symmetry is hard to miss.
Four decisions were escalated that did not need to be. In each, a fact about authority existed and had not reached the person.
Six pieces of work came back. In at least three, a fact about the work existed and had not reached the person.
Ten events in a quarter, one cause. The person experienced them as completely different kinds of problem — the first set as their own excessive caution, the second as the work being harder than expected — and attributed them to completely different things. Neither attribution mentioned transmission.
That is worth noticing, because it is why the problem is rarely named. Each symptom has a plausible local explanation that does not implicate the handover, and both explanations are about the person rather than about the information. A person who believes they are both too cautious and not thorough enough will work on their character, which is the one intervention guaranteed to change nothing.
The useful reframe is dull and it is the whole of this site: both sets are facts that existed and did not arrive. The fix for both is the same sentence written at the start.
The question that surfaces them in bulk
For anybody taking over an area, one question asked of two or three people who have been there a while:
What is true about this that I would not find out by reading the code?
It is better than "is there anything I should know" because it names the category — things that are true and unwritten — which is the one category people can actually search for in their own heads.
Expect two or three answers each. On the evidence of this site's record, that conversation would have prevented half the returns in a quarter.